Fontanelle, IA

Wednesday treated me to a gorgeous, sunny ride through the rolling hills of Iowa toward Omaha, Nebraska.

I saw a cemetery outside of Fontanelle and stopped to wander.

I'm not sure whether this was supposed to be a tree trunk or a broken saguaro, but it's nice stonework.

Round bales of a hay are a very common sight out here. I actually got to see a baler at work while riding toward Holdredge last night.

Somewhere on route 6, I caught up with the Mormon Trail. Having just read Riding in the Shadows of Saints, a book about a woman who rides the Trail alone on a motorcycle, I found this rather exciting.

This is good information:

At some point I got stuck in construction traffic. I turned off the bike, removed my jacket, and took some photos. I even got photobombed by a butterfly.

The construction zones are so long out here (I clocked this one at 3 miles) that there's a man whose entire job is to drive a pickup truck back and forth, from one end to the other, leading the cars through. There's a sign on the top that says "PILOT VEHICLE, FOLLOW ME." The pilot driver, of course, seems to have a spectacular skill for driving at that awkward speed that motorcycles don't do, which is too fast to actually stop and too slow to stay upright.