Made it into Imperial Nebraska yesterday evening around 5:00 p.m., just in time to meet up with my sister there and her husband. I had spent the time prior to that in driving and sightseeing. I was up at 5:30 in the morning, something that those who know me well, will find unbelievable. But remember I've spent most of the last 10 months on east coast time, so really it felt like 7:30 a.m. for me. Also early, but the rest area was also very noisy, so I was awake even earlier than that, I just refuse to get up before it gets light out there.

    On the road finally after a small bite to eat and then on to the town of Kearney, the place that was on the top of the list of places for me to stop that day. Pulled into town around 9:30 and located the Union Pacific Railroads 'Bailey' classification yard. They have an 8 story tower there that you can go up in and watch all the trains and railroad cars as they pull in and get resorted, or classified, into new trains that will take them to their final destination. At over 8 miles long and 2 miles wide, with more than 370 miles of actual track, this is the largest sorting yard of it's kind in the world. Of course you need to be a bit of a train nerd to really appreciate what is going on out there in front of you. But I qualify for that so it was a lot of fun to see all of the trains pulling in and dropping off their cars to be sorted. They have two of what they call 'Hump' yards there. In this type of sorting yard they park a train load of cars on top of a short, 20 to 40 foot high, hill and then push them one by one over the top and down the track to 1 of 27 sorting tracks. Of course you have to be able to limit their speed just right by using these 'sqeezey' sections of track work called wheel retarders, otherwise you have cars crashing into each other and damaging car parts or the freight they are carrying, or worse, not going far enough to couple onto the last car in the line of cars. The guy running the hump yard yesterday was a true maestro, not a single car that I watched either hit to hard or didn't hit at all.

    So I spent nearly 2 hours there watching all the scurrying about before getting too hungry to stay any longer. Went and had a bite of lunch and then pushed on towards my sisters place. Once we all met up it was time to sit down and have a cold beer, or two, before finally going in and taking that much needed, and highly anticipated, hot shower. Oh how good it feels to be clean once again.

    A real nice evening to sit around and talk, have a good meal and watch a movie on TV. Earlier in the evening we had taken my truck and trailer out to the Ag. Co-op where my brother-in-law works and stuck it in one of their shops just in case it rained or hailed this weekend. That turned out to be a good idea as we had a big storm cell come through this afternoon with tons of rain and hail and a lot of heavy wind. We were all down at a new Mexican restaurant here in town eating dinner when the tornado sirens started to go off. Wasn't really to worried about it as we had been outside just minutes before and could see that most of the storm was going to pass to the north and east of where we were. So we just went ahead and had a nice meal.

   But I am getting ahead of myself on what happened today. It was yet another early morning today. We were all up by 5:30 and after a quick meal of breakfast burritos, we loaded up the truck and headed for the lake,early enough to be able to unload the boat right away and shove off. We mostly trolled for walleye today and the fishing was a bit slow to start out with. I managed to catch the first keeper walleye of the day, which meant it had to be a minimum of 15 inches long. A few other fish after that, some big enough to keep and some not, but it didn't start to pick up until around 9:30 when the walleye finally started hitting. We caught dozens over the next two hours, but most ended up being to small and had to be turned back. We did finally end up with a full dozen keepers though, 4 per person, several of them in the 17 inch-plus category.  There were also several white bass picked up as well as 3 smaller channel cat fish. So we were done fishing and heading off the lake by 12:30, back home 30 mins later, and had the boat unhitched and all of the fish filleted in another 30 mins.

   So that left the rest of the afternoon to take showers, drink beer and just relax until we headed out to the Mexican restaurant that I spoke of before. Right now we are all sitting back watching TV and playing on our computers. It's pretty funny to see all 3 of us sitting around typing on our laptops.  I imagine it will be a couple more hours of talk and B-S'ing before finally heading off to bed again.