Sunday night Heather and I decided to go for a walk, as we seem to be running a surplus of amazingly nice fall weekends right now.
Unfortunately, we were a little slow getting left to go for a walk and it was getting dark, making the neighborhood we were going to walk in sort of a bad choice. Our hastily composed plan ‘b’ was to head downtown to investigate the walking bridge over the Missouri river that we had heard people talk about.
Our first problem was we had no idea where the bridge actually was. The only directions we could remember was that you “can get to it from the ConAgra park.” About half the park is closed at night, so we walked a long ways around the park, going the wrong way hoping to find an open gate. We could see people walking along the path across the main lake, so we were pretty sure there was some way in. After giving up on our initial search, we saw the bridge peaking through the trees! The only problem was we had been walking in completely the wrong direction for over 10 minutes, and the bridge looked to be about 4 miles away. We also had no idea how to get to it still.
We walked across a few streets, under some bridges, and across a set of railroad tracks, finally getting ourselves onto the proper path to get to the bridge. From the path we could see that none of the obstacles mentioned in the preceding sentence were necessary, as there was a cool raised walkway that let you hop straight from the open half of the ConAgra park onto the path we were now standing on. I would recommend using the raised path after dark, our path was a little sketchy, and lacked sidewalks for about half the way.
All that got us only part of the way to the bridge, but at least we could really see it at this point. Sadly we didn’t bring a camera, so you are on your own to find out what the bridge looks like, but it is fairly cool in the dark. we walked across the bridge, discovered that you cant see much looking off the bridge in the dark, and that there isn’t anything on the Iowa side right now.
Heading back we found, for the second time that night, that the view retracing our steps was a lot better than it had been going out. You get a rather amazing view of the Omaha downtown at night when walking back from the Iowa side of the bridge.
Before heading home we spent a few minutes setting in the dark watching the big fountain in the lake at the middle of the ConAgra park. It made for the perfect way to end the evening.
you really can’t complain about having a day that broke 60 degrees, was as beautiful as Sunday was, and that you could set on a parkbench without a coat on, when it comes this late in October. I just hope this is a sign of weather to come, and we aren’t using up all our unusually temperate days before the wedding. It would be nice to get one of those freak 50-degree-plus days January 24th 2009 😉
-Jordan
Nelsons 