Nebraska: 810 miles
Four Sleeps
Team B arrived from Lubbock and met us at the Feit Memorial Park Campground in Blue Springs, Nebraska. Team A briefed their replacements on what was in store for them while Jerod and I thawed our partially frozen steaks on my bike’s warm engine. That oil I saw next to Jerod’s tire earlier in the day meant his front suspension fork was leaking. It could be catastrophic if not addressed.
The next morning was cold, and Adele procrastinated her final run of the trip. She decided to sleep an hour longer and run fewer miles. She ran six. Kenneth prepped my helmet for the last time. Before he placed the Rode wireless microphone in my helmet, he recorded a cue so later the editing team would know what day the recording was from: “Brandon’s mic. Day nine. Leaving Blue Springs,” Kenneth said into the small microphone. Team B was now on the clock. We had breakfast with the entire crew in Beatrice, Nebraska, at the Country Cookin’ Café, an expansive subterranean diner under the Nebraska Baseball Hall of Fame.
Jerod and Simon had scheduled the transition to be a short mileage day. That would give us time to find an expert to inspect Jerod’s motorcycle. A leaking fork seal has the potential to dump oil on the tire or brakes. Luckily, we found Rod’s Power Sports, a large Honda motorcycle dealer, on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Anna Walker took over Kenneth’s audio duties. She rode in the Jeep with Simon, Kenneth, and Eddie McBroom from Team B. Kenneth helped Anna make the transition. He gave her tips on how to handle our helmets. “Don’t touch the visor,” he said. “You don’t want to leave fingerprints.” They followed us into Lincoln, Nebraska, and spent three hours wandering the dealership as we got Jerod’s fork repaired. It was a great introduction to the art of waiting.
Anna is a sophomore from Richardson, Texas. Her senior year of high school, she developed a passion for motorsports from watching the Netflix docuseries, “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” She loved the idea of combining motorsports with a travel documentary. She specifically chose Texas Tech because of the Adventure Media class and all the experiential programs offered in the College of Media & Communication. No other school she looked at was offering that level of in-the-field experience. The Great Plains Project is her first field course at Texas Tech.
`We camped at Branch Oak Lake, outside of Lincoln, and watched the sky turn orange as the sun set along the lake. The next morning, we said goodbye to the hardened production veterans of Team A as they departed for Lubbock. Jill Fulton and Shaylin Romero joined Anna in the Jeep. Savanna Montgomery and Eddie McBroom slid into the Tundra to complete our new quintet.
The first gravel miles of the day were dusty as we encountered a convoy of large trucks hauling soybeans from a field. We stopped and watched a harvester pour grain into the back of a large trailer called a buggy. Jerod and I rolled into the field and struck up a conversation with Steve Rafert, the farmer running the harvest. It was an impromptu interview that was literally in the field. Anna was stoked that folks we encountered were as curious about us as we were about them. She stood nearby with the boom mic and recorded our conversation as Shaylin and Simon videoed. The transition was seamless. It felt like this new crew had been with us the whole time.
The sun set and we were shrouded in the magical light of golden hour as we traveled along Nebraska’s Minimum Maintenance Roads. The county has a laissez-faire approach to grading these cozy little dirt roads, making them perfect for our all-terrain motorcycles. Simon’s Jeep was loving the rough-and-tumble road, too. The crew inside was feeling some good vibrations -- a kinetic energy as they careened along the rugged road through the remote prairie. The windows were down, and the air was pleasantly brisk. Simon handed Anna a camera to shoot out her window. Anna was invigorated. They were engaged in good, hard work and having fun doing it. She was ready to tackle the next five days.Nebraska is an amazing destination that will shatter any preconceived notions you have about The Cornhusker State. Every night we camped next to a spectacular body of water and rode through some of the most epic landscape of the trip. Along its remote and expansive dirt roads, we cut through vast amounts of cultivated corn, crossed the braided Platte River, traversed the undulating hills and valleys of Loess Canyon, and struggled to keep our motorcycles upright in the Sandhills of Nebraska. We departed through the Nebraska National Forest along dramatic bluffs with rock spires and towering pine trees.