What’s not to like about Nebraska? The drivers for one. The speed (75 mph). The weaving. The blocking (that’s you Ms. Ponytail in the SUV with the YOLO sticker). Bostonians are meek in comparison.
Off the road, however, people are congenial, the terrain more rolling than Iowa, a state so flat you can see from one end to the other, and the Best Western in Omaha is a tidy and functioning version of its Mishawaka cousin. The pool had water. The gym was open. And breakfast! A cornucopia of cereals, fruit, and oatmeal. Even some microwave pancakes.
Most importantly, the stairs were carpeted, which freed Maisie from the dreaded elevator. She padded up and down, up and down, on our multiple trips to walk the empty strip malls surrounding the hotel.
The day’s Cultural Excursion, however, suffered defeat. The mission: peruse the Rose Wilder papers at the Herbert Hoover Museum in West Branch, Iowa. The woman behind the desk at the info center of the Hoover compound, a National Historic Site, was puzzled. She had never heard of the collection. “But even if it is there, it won’t do you much good,” she said. “The museum is closed until June.”
She offered to find a ranger to verify if the papers, which chronicle Wilder’s work with her famous mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the Little House series, was indeed housed in the Hoover archives, but we declined. According to a recent story in the Boston Globe, Wilder and Hemingway are the only American writers whose papers are housed at presidential libraries. And that’s not fake news.
Maybe next time we’re in the neighborhood.
Driving Miss Maisie 
Like the pirate look Bill! Argggggg!!☠️
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If the Wilder papers are in Hoover’s library, does that mean Hemingway’s are in W’s library? We just finished the second 2 hours of Burn’s PBS special about him. Okay, I did. DQ slept through most of i
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Hemingway’s stuff is at the JFK Library. You know, two manly men. W? Not so much
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