The four of us at the Brickstreet Station - Woodbine, IA
Day 18 - Underwood, Iowa to Denison, Iowa
Hello all: This morning we left our motel in Underwood, IA a little after 8:00 a.m. We headed west on county road G30, turned left on county road L34, right on Jupiter Rd - drove over gravel for 4.5 miles - and after a few more left and right jogs we got to State Highway 183 at Crescent, IA to reconnected with the old Lincoln Highway. We headed north on the 183, passing through Honey Creek and Loveland before meeting up with U.S. 30 at Missouri Valley…where we finally enjoyed breakfast. After lunch we headed east on US 30, stopping in Logan, Woodbine, Dunlap, Dow City and finally Denison…
Continue reading ‘Day 18 Road Report: Underwood to Denison, IA…Pictures, Map Updates and a special detour…’
Columbus is a prosperous town with a 3% unemployment rate. It’s a little too perfect for me, but check it out if you’re looking for an easy commute, reasonable land prices, a strong work ethic, a moral majority and an elaborate water park.
Leaving Columbus, it was disappointing to be on a four-lane stretch of Route 30 that swallows up the Lincoln Highway for 20 miles. Does this section portend the end of our highway? Will our treasured stretches of the first, second and third iterations of the old road disappear? If so, get out and see it ASAP. So far as Bob and I are concerned all of what’s left should be classified as a National Scenic Byway — as is the case in Illinois.
Continue reading ‘Day 17 Road Report: Columbus, NE to Underwood, IA’
The PhotoMap is updated through Day 16. Click your way across the continent and see what you’ve been going without, homesteaders!
Click for the Lincoln Highway PhotoMap
On our early-AM tour of Kearney, we wondered if the town abandoned its historic center for the north section of 2nd Ave, a sprawl of strip malls, including fast-food restaurants, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and most every chain store you can think of. Included with downtown’s original red brick road & 1890’s buildings are two abandoned movie theaters. Oddly, one old film palace’s marquee advertises that it’s been converted to a dentist’s office. Certainly a strange venue for a root canal. Kearney’s focus seems to be on the new 2nd Avenue strip malls. All this just off of America’s legendary highway. Does prosperity mean leaving the past for a character-free present?
Continue reading ‘Day 16 Road Report: Kearney to Columbus, NE’
Click to download Piaggio MP3 Google Earth RideMap 1
As of 1500hr ET, Piaggio Ground Control has made public the Piaggio MP3 Lincoln HIghway Google Earth RideMap (.98b), comprising data, routing and images collected from Buddy & Bob from Day 1 through midnight of last night - a total of two weeks progress deeply embedded in a KML cross-linked back to the Road Reports posted daily here.
If you like the Google DayMaps posted here daily, if you want to see in even greater detail Buddy & Bob’s Herculean efforts to navigate their MP3’s down the ever-elusive Lincoln Highway, then you’re going to love our Google Earth RideMaps. You will have to download Google Earth - don’t worry, it’s free - and we will be posting easy directions as the countdown proceeds this afternoon.
In the meantime, if you want a refresher on using our Google Maps DayMaps, here’s our original post from Day 1 of our Riders’ adventure.
Piaggio Ground Control out.
Day 15 - North Platte to Kearney, Nebraska
Getting from point A to point B can be rather tedious and predictable in a car. This is seldom the case when traveling on a bike, and even less so when the bike is an MP3. Every day of the tour has revealed unanticipated surprises: places we’ve seen, people we’ve met and roads we’ve traveled. Continue reading ‘Day 15 Road Report: North Platte to Kearney, NE’
"Clutch out at 8 AM", said Bob. Only trouble is the MP3 doesn’t have a clutch. Old habits die hard. Nevertheless, "clutch out" it was (we’re past the age of change) and we were on our way to reconnecting with the original Lincoln Highway. The Coloradoloop of the highway was an afterthought lobbied for by Fort Collins and Denver. I suspect the majority of drivers were not seduced by Colorado PR and stayed north, heading directly from WY to NE.
Continue reading ‘Day 14: Buddy & Bob’s Road Report on Re-Discovering America…via the Lincoln Highway’
