{"id":242,"date":"2008-09-23T03:09:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-23T03:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2008\/09\/our-amazing-weekend.html"},"modified":"2012-05-20T16:24:30","modified_gmt":"2012-05-20T21:24:30","slug":"our-amazing-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2008\/09\/our-amazing-weekend.html","title":{"rendered":"Nebraska Discoveries 6: Our Weekend in North Platte"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend we rented a camper from the Air Force base and drove it 280 miles west of here to the town of North Platte, Nebraska. They were holding their annual “Railfest”<\/a>, this big Union Pacific Railroad<\/a>\/Town of North Platte celebration weekend. The UP sponsors everything, lots of fun for everyone. There’s a festival at the town park, plus lots of train-related activites throughout the rest of the town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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We visited several historic UP locomotives<\/a>, visited the 8 story Golden Spike observation tower<\/a>, and got to ride in a little mini-train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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For Sunday morning, I made arrangements for tickets for a bus tour of Bailey Yard, the UP’s classification yard. That was one of the most incredible experiences for any railfan, and even *I* found it impressive. Dave writes more about it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We drove home right after the tour, taking our times by driving east on U.S. 30 from North Platte to Grand Island (about 115 miles). This way we could parallel the UP tracks and saw at least 20 trains!<\/p>\n

As for the camping, once Dave and I got over the initial shock of (a) requiring about 40 gallons of gas to get the camper from Omaha to North Platte and (b) everything you have to do to set up the camper at the RV campsite (water, power, leveling, starting up the fridge), we figured we’d have a relaxing weekend on our hands. I made a nice chicken and rice dinner with our dutch oven, then we toasted marshmallows and made Smores with the campfire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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But at 1am Friday night, we were awakened by an alarm bell: the propane detector was telling us “no more propane”, although we hadn’t used any since dinnertime. Actually, a circuit board went bad in the 3-way power converter unit (which is what seamlessly transfers power from battery to AC for the onboard fridge, water pump and lighting)…so overnight the power switched from AC to battery and the battery died.<\/p>\n

Dave and I did about an hour’s worth of troubleshooting, between 1-2 am Friday night…and gave up and went back to sleep angry. By Saturday, we just told ourselves we have a big hardened tent. Then we went on and enjoyed the rest of our weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend we rented a camper from the Air Force base and drove it 280 miles west of here to the town of North Platte, Nebraska. They were holding their annual “Railfest”, this big Union Pacific Railroad\/Town of North Platte celebration weekend. The UP sponsors everything, lots of fun for everyone. There’s a festival […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[68,249,59,53,37],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5ycQ0-3U","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":419,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2010\/03\/nebraska-discoveries-snow-geese.html","url_meta":{"origin":242,"position":0},"title":"Nebraska Discoveries 10: Snow Geese","date":"14 March 10","format":false,"excerpt":"For the past 2-3 weeks, it's been slowly warming here. I wish I had blogged a little more about the extreme bitter cold we experienced here, and the record-after-record-after-record snowfall we had here in the Omaha area since December. I'll be updating our \"Vollmer Weather Curse\" post soon with this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"bird watching\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":372,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2009\/07\/stupid-mulberries.html","url_meta":{"origin":242,"position":1},"title":"Stupid Mulberries","date":"06 July 09","format":false,"excerpt":"As most people know, Nebraska is more or less rolling prarielands, with very very few trees.The part of Nebraska we're in has more terrain to it, and it also has some nice wooded areas. Particularly along the Platte and Missouri Rivers. We live about 5 miles north of the Platte,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"gardening\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":425,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2010\/04\/nebraska-discoveries-2-flowering-trees.html","url_meta":{"origin":242,"position":2},"title":"Nebraska Discoveries 11: Flowering Trees","date":"17 April 10","format":false,"excerpt":"Today I went on a number of errands, including to our nearby model train store to pick up a boxcar Dave ordered, and to the local large children's consignment sale that's wrapping up this weekend. I decided to grab my camera and capture some of the pretty trees that are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"flowers\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":230,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2008\/09\/nebraska-state-fair.html","url_meta":{"origin":242,"position":3},"title":"Nebraska Discoveries 4: The Nebraska State Fair","date":"02 September 08","format":false,"excerpt":"Today we paid a visit to the last day of the Nebraska State Fair in Lincoln. Unlike the North Carolina State Fair, this is somewhat smaller, mainly because most of the competitions are for youth, through their 4-H organizations. The highlight for me was the demolition derby. We never made\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"nebraska\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2612,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2013\/09\/colorado-discoveries-13-mount-evans.html","url_meta":{"origin":242,"position":4},"title":"Colorado Discoveries 13: Mount Evans","date":"28 September 13","format":false,"excerpt":"Click here for a picture from Flickr user Kevin Bauman, which is a lovely view from Denver. Mount Evans is one of Colorado's 50+ Fourteeners and is one of the ones nearest to Denver. Mount Bierstadt is also nearby, and we could easily see it as we were ascending the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"colorado\"","img":{"alt_text":"I wish I had gotten a picture when I was further away, and this isn't even the peak. The peak is just to the right of this, and we were probably at about 12,900' here so you aren't looking all that high up.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_3551-1024x678.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":435,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2010\/05\/nebraska-discoveries-5-kool-aid.html","url_meta":{"origin":242,"position":5},"title":"Nebraska Discoveries 14: Kool Aid!*","date":"15 May 10","format":false,"excerpt":"*Yes, you read that correctly! I introduced Kool-Aid to the kids recently. \u00a0I guess they'd had it before at birthday parties and stuff, but I never made it for the boys the good old fashioned way: the little packet, 1 cup of sugar (give or take) and 2 quarts of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"cooking\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1050,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/1050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}