July 22nd, 2009
9.1 Miles
Short walking day today, and thank goodness for that. I was finished walking by 10:30AM and the first thing I did was to take a nap, but where am I located? That’s right… next to the train tracks. I will be following these tracks for about the next month. It’s interesting though, as I was on the road and all of these trains go by all day long, those engineers must be curious as to who this old guy with the handcart is that has been walking West for the last few weeks. Because I’m friendly, at the beginning I would wave, but most of the time I got no reaction. I felt like a little kid riding by a semi-truck and trying to get them to blow their horn. Well, these guys must run the same route, over and over and get bored with their routes, so pretty soon when I would wave, they would blow their horn. Now, when they see me, they open their window open, wave, and blow the horn. It keeps me entertained when they go by. So here we are in the middle of NE and we do this supportive salute to each other… the two oldest forms of transportation on the road at this time. Me pulling an 1856 handcart, and the train, which helped build the West. Maybe I have too much time on my hands, but I think that it is nostalgic.
We just finished one intense rain and hail storm, just a few minutes ago. I have photos that I will try and get onto the net asap. These storms in the Midwest are just crazy, as you have heard me describe them before. Well I have gotten two phone calls in the last hour telling me that I need to take cover here shortly because there is another storm cell that has the potential for doing some destruction. I can see it way off on the horizon and I can
hear the thunder in the distance as though it were mortars going off, miles away. I am waiting to set up my tent so I don’t have to try and keep it in this county. We’ll see how it goes.
Well before the storm gets here, I’m going to make a turkey bone soup stock. Remember that I shot the two turkeys with my camera and got two turkey legs at WalMart, well after I ate all of the meat, I have been saving the bones so I can boil them and then add a little bit of the barley that I am allowed to have. Mmmmmm…. Good….. turkey bone soup.
PS. I came up with something to eat that wasn’t too bad. I call it “Beg, Borrow, or Stew”. I had the two turkey bones left from me chewing on them, broke them in half to be able to fit and to get the marrow out from the center and dropped them into about a quart of boiling water with ample salt (because I need the salt). Next I had a red potato from over 3 weeks ago and cube it up and put it in. I then had an onion that was donated to me in Council Bluffs a couple of weeks ago and it needed to be used so I put the whole thing in there, chopped into large chunks. My last item was another piece of sweet corn that I found along-side the road, and I put it in last. I simmered all of that for about 25 minutes and I had an awesome pioneer stew. I had two Keiser rolls from a few days ago that were getting pretty firm, so I used them to dunk into the broth and presto…. You have “Beg, Borrow or Stew”. Twern’t too bad….