Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska Part 1: Farms

Rather than talk about the drive across the midwest in chronological order, I thought I'd break it up into themes.  After all, on long trips most of what is happening is thoughts running through the brain while scenery flashes by.  Makes for a boring story afterwards - "then I thought about silos for 20 miles, and wondered how the grain on the bottom doesn't get crushed..."

For a quick background, I drove across Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska on the "blue highways" (actually black and gray on my map) running between I-80 and I-90.  It took a little longer, but not really that much, considering all the roads are straight and the speed limit is 55 or 65. 

The first theme is farms.  I was expecting the huge, perfectly flat corn fields that I have seen before, driving across I-80.  While I did see that for about an hour in eastern Nebraska, most of what I saw was rolling hills with smaller farms (still huge by New England standards) and wooded valleys with clusters of farmhouses.  I got really excited about old barns, so have a bunch of pictures of them.  One advantage to the blue highways is the lack of traffic, so I could pull over as often as I wanted for a quick snapshot.  Here are some samples. 

I think the farmland that surprised me the most was western Illinois.  Near the Mississippi River I started hitting more valleys and it reminded me a lot of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.  I could see myself living in some of the medium -sized towns, like Elizabeth or Galena.  Here is some farmland near Elizabeth, Illinois: 

Now compare that with Iowa:

And then, more flat, Nebraska

But Nebraska has hills, too: 

It's mid September, so everywhere I go I see harvesting.  One radio report I heard said that the Nebraska corn harvest is two percent complete, which means there are a lot of fields of golden corn, and lots of work to be done in the next few weeks.