05.02.06
“If the sky above you should turn dark and full of clouds and that old north wind should begin to blow…” James Taylor
Our travels were fairly uneventful until hitting Big Springs, Nebraska - except for a minor incident involving large men who didn’t like hippies and a tire iron. Good thing we were fast talkers and even faster runners.Big Springs is self-described as a “small community with a big heart.”Boy, you could have fooled us. I guess things have changed in the last 30 years. It is located10 miles east of the Nebraska-Colorado border, close to where I-80 towards Wyoming and I-76 towards Colorado split off. We did not want to go to Colorado because of the hitchhiking laws there, so we figured we’d breeze through Wyoming then on through Utah and Nevada to California. What we didn’t expect was the big blizzard that shut down I-80 going into Wyoming. We also didn’t expect that none of the people who stopped and talked to us wouldn’t give us that important piece of information. Car after car stopped and offered to take us to Denver, Colorado, but no one told us why they weren’t going to Wyoming. Meanwhile the wind had picked up and the temperature had dramatically dropped. Also, the truckers started playing their favorite game of speeding up in the left hand lane and swerving over to the right just before reaching us so the force of their wind would tumble us through the snow and scatter our packs. They usually blew their horns as they passed - kind of like an evil laugh. After many hours, we trudged to the truck stop for a meal and some nice hot coffee. The next few hours we rotated between standing out by the road and going inside for coffee and to warm up. Finally the manager of the truck stop told us that unless we were buying a full meal, we would have to drink our coffee outside. Remember when I said we had been given gifts when we left Connecticut that would come in handy later on? Well, someone had given us a “space blanket.” It was a very thin sheet of mylar with plastic on one side specially designed for use in outer space to protect the astronauts against the elements. We sat outside the restaurant huddled in our space blanket asking everyone who came by for a ride. It was actually tolerable inside our little cocoon. When the manager came out and threatened to call the police if we didn’t get away from his restaurant, we asked him to please do that, thinking that we could have a nice warm place to stay the night, but he just walked away muttering. Finally, after 46 hours of being stuck in that “small community with a big heart”, a young woman told usabout the blizzard and the closed roads. She offered to take us to Denver. We could have gotten a ride to Denver many, many hours earlier had we known. Oh well, things happen for a reason. She made riding crops for a living and had her small car packed full of them. We wedged ourselves into her back seat on top of these boxes of crops and slept all the way to Denver where we planned to take a bus to Salt Lake City.