"It's only 266 miles from Golden, Colorado to North Platte, Nebraska!" This was imbedded in Cheryl's memory from the days of her youth working at the Holiday Inn in Golden.

Cheryl and I had to travel a little bit farther than that to get away on a much needed "out of Bailey" experience! We planned to take three days off from the store and go on a photo safari after the migrating Sandhill cranes.

We checked with our good friends and reknown "birders" Sylvia and Bill Brockner. We wanted to know if we should head south in Colorado or northeast to Nebraska to find the most Sandhills. Armed with good information and several cameras, we set off on our mission. We made motel reservations in North Platte, Nebraska, and planned to be near both forks of the Platte River a couple of hours before sunset.

We made good time crusing on I-76 and I-80 even with a coupls of stops at old familiar places along the way.

We got off Interstate 80 at Ogalala, Nebraska, and followed US-30 east along the rivers. We were a bit worried about how few birds of any kind we were seeing along the way. The Redwing Blackbird here kept our hopes up for a little while.