Itinerary - Day 3

Day 3 of our trip has us on the road again for another long drive. Today, we're leaving Rock Island, Illinois and heading for Gothenburg, Nebraska. Today's drive will be approximately 546 miles, with an estimated travel time of 8 hours 45 minutes.

The drive will take us through Iowa City and Des Moines, Iowa, as well as Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska. I'll have to take a closer look at some of these places to see whether there's anything worth stopping for along the way.

According to Wikipedia, Gothenburg, Nebraska is one of only two cities or towns in the world with that name. The other is the second largest city in Sweden, and the original home of the Volvo car company.

There's not a whole lot to say about Gothenburg, NE. It was once a stop on the Pony Express Trail, and there is an original Pony Express station building that has been moved to the center of the town as a museum and historic site. If we have time, maybe I'll have Josh pose in front of the building for a picture.

Gothenburg, NE Pony Express Station

There's also a sod house museum in Gothenburg, dedicated to the design and structure of sod houses, which were commonly built in the high plains of Nebraska and Kansas during the pioneering days of the old west. I'm guessing we'll take a pass on this attraction.

Since this is going to be a day with another very long drive, I'm sure that once again, our main goals when we get there will be to set up our camp, make dinner and relax. We still have one more long day of driving in front of us until we reach our first real "destination", but I'll have more to say about that in the Day 4 Itinerary.

In case anyone is wondering how these locations were picked, our trip has us following Interstate 80 from New Jersey all the way to Colorado. The idea was to try to limit the daily mileage to somewhere between 500 and 600 miles. The places we're stopping are the locations of KOA affiliated campgrounds. I wanted to stop at "brand name" campgrounds along the way, to ensure at least some degree of reliability.

That's it for this leg of our trip.