I want to say out front that I am very impressed with Omaha. It seems like the quint-essential city to me. It is probably the cleanest city we have visited during our twenty-six years of April road trips. Today, at least so far, we have browsed through the Old Market area and spent several hours at the Durham Museum. Here are some pictures  of that.

The Old Market is perhaps twenty to thirty square blocks of very well restored buildings that contain restaurants and shops. Even though it was pretty chilly it was a very pleasant day of browsing through them. It was a hard choice as to where we would eat lunch but we settled down with tortilla soup and tacos.

The Durham Museum is housed in the old union station just south of the Old Market place so this was one of those rare on-the-road days without being in the car. The museum celebrates the history of Nebraska and especially its transportation. One impressive thing about the museum was all the bronze life-size statues throughout the building. Above are a couple of them. No, that beautiful lady in the orange coat was not a bronze that is my wife.  The last sentence reminds me of that wonderful quote “no, he’s not heavy; he’s my brother” because tomorrow we will be going to Boys Town for a visit.

The final thing I wanted to talk about in this post is how well they reported on the native American history of the area. They did a very good job of telling me about that. My native American heritage makes me always seek at that type of info.  As the photo above shows that in 1881 a court case in Nebraska was the first time an Indian was recognized as a person by the U.S. government. Before then they were just savages to be controlled and taken off their land (how’s that for native American spin 🙂 ).  The story goes on to state that in 1924 the U.S. even declared them citizens but it seems to me that since they were here thousands of years before the white man it should have been the other way around.

This afternoon we will be having pizza in the Old Market district and then on for a stroll through  the Heartland of America park. More pictures of that tomorrow.