Sutherland to Fairbury

Clear dawn after a cool night, east on I80 to Kearney, a hundred miles of easy going through corn, more hay, ponds, bible camps. Kearney has a nice old downtown, brick buildings and red brick streets, well cared for and seem to be in use, 

including a brewpub – Thunderhead, good name for thunderstorm country.

At the end of the main street, housed in a restored beautiful old marble post office, the Museum of Nebraska Art 

has a very nice collection of art by or relating to Nebraska, including especially a fine collection of paintings and drawings of Nebraska frontier times – roughly 1820's through 1860's, before the transcontinental railroad was completed – by soldiers, travelers, naturalists, some artists attached to expeditions, including Audubon and several subdued(!) Bierstadts (images are property of MONA). So well done, and so evocative of the time and place when Ft Kearney was a major hub for travelers going east and west.

Finally found that elusive coffee shop with WiFi, across from the university campus (Univ of Western Nebraska). Back on the road headed south and east, Hwy 44, 34, 74 - land remarkably flat the only landmarks town watertowers and grain elevators, and remarkably farmed, all of it filled with corn, some soybeans, a little wheat, but mile after mile after mile of corn. Many big sprinklers but hard to see or imagine that all of it is irrigated, the amount of water would be staggering.

Stopped in a small town (Holstein, I think) to mail a card, and like all of them, the few hundred people still there - and whimsy still alive! -

but the block of brick main street boarded up. Silent, perhaps waiting? Who knows.

South on 281 from Ayr (Willa Cather highway, who would've guessed) the land a little more rolling, pasture in the draws, get some feel for the prairie they would have crossed back when, following the long diagonal from St Joseph, Missouri to Fort Kearney, roughly along the Little Blue River.

Red Cloud, hometown of Willa Cather and far enough from anywhere for the red brick downtown 

(yes, streets, too, where was all this brick made?) to be healthy, including the Willa Cather center housed in a fine red brick and red sandstone – where was that from? - former bank building.

Driving due east with the long late afternoon light behind me, Hwy 136 a narrow paved road paralleling the Kansas state line, no traffic, calm, quiet, sometimes back into corn land, sometimes more rolling, some hay and cattle, small towns (“there is a balm in Gilead”) scattered around. Headed for a campground but something you just don't pass by

so pulled into Fairbury for the night. The motel owners looking without success for a manager, made me ponder life in SE Nebraska. Not likely.