Our first full day of driving was completely uneventful. We left the campground in Cheyenne about 7:45 a.m. headed east into Nebraska. We stopped in Sidney, Nebraska for breakfast, at a rest area for lunch, for gas in North Platte, and for the night in Gretna, about 20 miles west of Omaha. The motorhome is running well and everything is working as it should be. We’re doing better on gas mileage and on gas prices than estimated (so far) which is a nice benefit

Nebraska has a program to promote the use of ethanol in gasoline. So, at service stations in Nebraska, the gasoline with 10% ethanol is dramatically less expensive than non-ethanol gasoline. For instance, in North Platte, standard 87 octane gasoline was $3.449 per gallon while 10% ethanol gasoline was $3.079 per gallon. Even that price, non-ethanol gasoline was thirty cents a gallon more expensive than in either Wyoming or Iowa! Nebraska must have some of the highest state gasoline taxes in the area. I would not want to live in Nebraska simply for that reason alone.

We’ve driven and slept through a significant amount of rain. It rained for the last two hours of the drive into Cheyenne and then rained hard during the night. We had a couple of sections of serious rain across Nebraska and then last night it rained, with serious thunder and lightning, much of the night. We’re now about twenty miles west of Des Moines, Iowa, and have just driven out of the rain. We may even see sunshine sometime today. The Big Road Trip continues eastward.