We’re off to Grand Island, Nebraska this afternoon, taking advantage of a cheap flight to tackle a blank space on our county quest map.

Our itinerary, or lack thereof

We don’t have much on our itinerary, and plan to play most of the weekend…by ear 🌽😉 (sorry).

That said, the general plan is to head northwest along scenic Hwy 2 through the Sand Hills region up to Carhenge (the only “must-see” on our trip), then loop our way south and back towards Grand Island. If we have time, we’ll overshoot a bit and do a shorter loop around the Columbus-Norfolk area. We fly home Sunday evening, so we have less than 3 days to explore. Will we travel fast and pack each day as full as we can? Or will we take a more leisurely approach and simply enjoy a relaxing weekend away in cooler temps? No idea!

We’ll likely focus our route on strategically marking off a bunch of unvisited counties, while still seeing anything of interest along our route. I’ve already done large swaths of the historic trails (Oregon, California, Pony Express, et al) that cross the state, but I’m sure we’ll make a few related stops. And there are some other attractions—such as the Golden Spike Tower, Great Platte River Road Archway, and some smaller history museums—that are on our list.

And by luck, it happens to be opening weekend at the Nebraska State Fair (great domain, btw), which is conveniently located in Grand Island, so we may try to add that on Sunday prior to flying out. Then again, I see that it’ll be “4-H Day” at the fair, so…maybe not.

To tank, or not to tank?

The only truly “Nebraska” activity we’re considering (besides, perhaps, getting some Runza) is going tanking.

What’s tanking, you ask? Well, it’s akin to tubing down a river in a metal cattle tank. It’s apparently a legit local thing; a whole bunch of river outfitters rent them, and there are even tanking races, too.

Why might we go tanking? Just for the shits and giggles, really. And hey, I love relaxing river trips, and it’s been awhile since I’ve paddled my beloved Lower Salt River. I’ve also been contemplating adopting a new quest of paddling on a river in some minimum number of states, so this could add Nebraska to my list.

I’m not sure if the timing will work, or if the weather will cooperate, or if we should be out on the water for so long given my recent health issues (my doc barred me from kayaking for now; but hey, he never said anything about tanking).

Either way, we’ve tried to pack in a way that gives us the option of doing some tanking if the opportunity arises. And if it doesn’t happen this trip, I’m pretty sure that we’ll be back to do it at some point. These cheap flights to Grand Island might help unlock some future trips to the fly-over states that we wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

A new travel cooler

Speaking of packing, we’re big fans of having a cooler on road trips, so that we always have cold beverages available, even in remote areas or if we break down.

Most of our road trips originate from home, so it’s easy to bring a cooler or two. But even when we fly to a distant destination and rent a car, we often snag a cheap cooler from Walmart after we land, then donate it to someone in need or a charity shop on our way back to the airport.

But this trip is a bit unusual for us, as we’re only flying in for a long weekend, which makes the per-day cost of a cooler purchase much less appealing. An added challenge is that, because we bought such a cheap flight on a budget airline, we can’t bring any luggage. Instead, we must fit everything we need into a “personal item” that fits under the seat.

That led us to look for a small packable cooler that could fit in our small backpack. We tried a few different options before settling on one that holds 18 cans and folds down to about 3” thick, which we can make work. It has a rigid folding bar on each side, which seems like a great feature to help give it some additional stability.

Since we aren’t travel camping on this trip, we’ll have access to hotel ice machines each day, so even a poorly insulated cooler like this should work just fine for our needs.

Posts during the trip

I don’t expect to post any of my OTD photo posts for #Blaugust during the trip. But hopefully I can get caught back up on those yet again after we return.

In the meanwhile, I do hope to get at least a few trip photos posted to rsjon.es while we’re traveling. I’ll be the primary driver this weekend, so Jen will likely update her own site more frequently than I do. So if you’re dying to see if we didn’t die tanking, check out her site, too.