It will be nice when it’s done

I think I’ve mentioned more than once that a great theme song for Hubby and me should be, “On the Road Again.” As mentioned in the first column this month, we continued to crisscross the state for meetings.

The first week it was to Scottsbluff for some Nebraska Rural Electric Association meetings for Hubby. I tagged along to visit friends and of course, no trip west for long-time Nebraskans would be complete without a stop at Ole’s Big Game Lounge in Paxton.

Two days later we were on the road to the Eastern Nebraska Research Education and Extension Center for a roundtable with Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and members of Nebraska’s Congressional Delegation.

Throw in covering a Nebraska Soil Health Coalition Field Day in south central Nebraska near Bladen, a trip to watch the Nebraska Alumni Volleyball match in Lincoln and numerous activities in our own county, and you’ll see we’ve had a chance to experience first-hand the 2025 version of “Orange Cone Season” across Nebraska.

This year while judging I adopted my dear departed mother-in-law’s rule of leaving with 30 minutes to spare on your requested arrival time. Her theory was that always gave you a chance to change a flat tire and still arrive on time. This year it allowed for all the road construction delays.

With one exception, I needed nearly all of those 30 minutes. The highway from Elm Creek to Holdrege is being repaved, and I hit that one-way stoplight and pilot car at the I-80 interchange. At Broken Bow, Highway 2 through town is being repaved, and with the fairgrounds at the east end of the construction it was a long, slow drive, only to have mass confusion at the fairgrounds entrance because of the jog over the railroad tracks. Same at Ogallala, head-on-head traffic for I-80 work from Roscoe to the Ogallala exit confirmed my route home would be on Highway 30.

In conversing with one extension educator about the delays all of us were experiencing, she noted, “Yes, but it will be nice when it’s done.” Thus, my new summer mantra for all of us, “It will be nice when it’s done.”

So, in the meantime, I will mutter that phrase under my breath a few more times. Trips to Kansas City for the Husker game later this week and then to Colorado in September for my third national conference this year are sure to have a construction zone somewhere.

Trekking to Husker football games this fall will be tricky, as the expansion work to three lanes from Lincoln to near the Crete exit also continues. So please, take a deep breath, slow down in those construction zones and repeat after me, “It will be nice when it’s done.”