Lincoln, Nebraska

Running aside, Lincoln was an interesting town to visit.  I'd heard from various northwest folks that the town was all about Football and The Huskers and that was it.  It's a university town for sure.  The university only has about 35,000 students in it and a football stadium which seats 80,000 in a town of 250,000.  You do the math.
 
After the horrendous flight, we had a couple of days to recover.  We'd planned on doing a bit of easy site seeing.  Our hotel was right in downtown within walking distance of the university and the historic Haymarket District.  It looked very midwestern to me with very wide blocks, wide streets and unfortunately a lot of empty storefronts.  I'm used to busy downtown areas of Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver.  Vibrant and full of people and shops.  Not here.  it was all student focused and we found that no one walked around at all.  Very bizarre to us. 

I'd have thought that Lincoln had been hard hit with economic woes with all the empty storefronts but turns out they have some of the lowest unemployment in the nation.  The Haymarket district was more what I was expecting.  This is centered around the train station and was an area which has undergone revitalization recently.  It's fully of boutique shops and restaurants and cool old buildings.  May 1st, the weekly farmer's market opened for the year and we had to go.

That was more like it.  it was a gorgeous morning and everybody was cheerful.  We got the best "chocolate Persian baklava" and also picked up a couple jars of strawberry/rhubarb preserves.  The woman selling the preserves to us made sure to tell us that we could bring back the jelly jars for 50 cents apiece.  She was quite surprised to hear we were from Seattle and would not be returning them. 

My other goal based on what people had said of nebraska was to have steak.   Friday night (race was sunday) was going to be the day to hit that.  K unfortunately was still feeling a bit off from the flight the evening before and just had a bite of mine.  We went to Lazlo's in the Haymarket and I had the best steak I'd ever eaten.  Oh it just melted in my mouth.  The Empyrean oatmeal Stout was pretty good too. 

I loved hearing the sounds of the trains going by in the night.  That reminded me of when we lived in Pasadena.  We were both amazed at just how wide open the sky is.  we've both always lived in an area which is ringed with mountains.  You could see forever in the flat open country.