Hi Again!

We had a free day on Sunday, so decided to do an exciting road trip over to Nebraska to check out the famous Lake McConaughy! This is a very big lake to the west of the state, which totals 4 miles wide and 22 miles long, so pretty impressive. It also has white sandy beaches around the edge and allows all sorts of fun water-sports! Plus we’re like 1000 miles from the actual ocean, so this is our ocean now 🙂

But first, we had to get there. Our lovely car is all fixed and working now (it turns out that because there are no MOTs and the oil here is terrible you need to get the oil changed every 5000 miles or less. Now we know!) so we loaded it up and off we went.

It was a pretty long drive of about 3 1/2 hours each way, but we got to drive through parts of Wyoming and Colorado that we hadn’t seen before which was cool. Also Rob fell asleep immediately and stayed asleep for most of the drive down there, so the drive was not too taxing for him 😉 Here is the route we took:

So on the way there we went up through Wyoming, and we came back via Eastern Colorado. As promised both are almost completely empty of anything interesting to see, but we did get to stop at the signs on all the boarders and judge them! Wyoming’s sign was fabulous, and we were very impressed by it:

We have been to Wyoming a few times before but this was the first time that we had driven in via the I-25, because whilst the sign is awesome the road itself is a disaster. Lots of potholes and cheap tarmac. But I digress!

The Nebraska sign was also nowhere near as excellent at the Wyoming sign, which we found a little disappointing. We liked the green, but where was the wood? Where was the pizzazz? Also it meant waking Rob up again, which he was still not a fan of:

Still, we get to add Nebraska to the list of states visited (between us we are up to 14/ 50!) and I can scratch it off my map of the world.

As for Nebraska itself, it was almost exclusively grassland and an extremely straight road, but visibility was outstanding! We think we could see at least 50 miles away based on what towns we could see from how far out, plus we could see the mountains on the way back whilst still 60 minutes away from Fort Collins. Eventually we got our first peek at the lake!

We drove down to it, and tried to find a spot to relax for the day. The lake is actually super full this time of year, so most of the beach was underwater. This was actually quite a nice thing, since it meant that there weren’t too many people there and all the beaches were broken into little tiny hidden beaches. We found a fun secret spot and hunkered down:

The water did not look very clean, so we set up on the mini-beach and sunbathed for a few hours. Occasionally people would go past on their boats or paddle boards for our amusement:

After a few hours we were extremely hot and sweaty since it was boiling hot and I refused to move into the shade, so once we left our mini-beach we had to make a desperate dash for liquids. Fortunately, you are never far from a bar in the US!

Rob is still being an absolute hero and not drinking any sodas, but alas I was not so strong. In fact I was extremely unsupportive and chugged down like five pints of coca cola right in front of him, bad wife. It did bring me back to life though, and we had a good time laughing at Rob’s beer. For reasons unknown Budweiser has renamed itself ‘America’ for the next few months, because why not.

We also got some fries, because so sue me.

Anyway, after our tasty break we went down to a beach in front of the bar and found an even better secret place to call our own.

We set up our chairs and towels again, and read in the shade like the old people that we are. You could see more of the lake from here and there were more boats going past, plus there were lots of rocks so you could hear more gentle splashing. It was very zen 🙂

After some more reading we decided that we should at least touch the lake itself, so did a little paddling and jumping around on the rocks:

It was lots of fun, and as of yet we’re not showing any signs of parasitic infection. Anyone who gets in touch to let me know what parasites we might have (DAD) will be responded to harshly :p

After a little while we had to dry off and head back to the car for our drive back home.

We were lucky enough to see this little bird friend before he left, so once again we play name that bird:

Lake McConaughy is actually very famous for it’s bird watching, and has all sorts of rare birds that live there. However I don’t know anything more than that about it, since it was and is too hot to use my brain. Maybe we will take a more bird focused approach next time 😉

Anyway, we made it home safely and had a great time! We’re now working on planning our next adventures, so watch this space 🙂

Much Love! Xx