Travel Tuesday: Omaha Trip 2021, Part 1

Happy Tuesday friends! I am back with another Travel Tuesday series recapping our recent trip to Omaha, Nebraska! We went for a long weekend back in October during my son's MEA break. We've heard great things about their zoo and other museums in the area and it is a relatively short drive, so we decided to check it out!

Thursday, October 21, 2021

We hit the road relatively early this day. Of course I got myself a coffee on the way out :) My sister-in-law and her family live kind of on our way to Nebraska, so we were able to visit them on the way and meet our new niece! We got some Godfather's Pizza for lunch and were able to visit with them for a couple hours.

We got to our hotel late afternoon. We stayed at a Holiday Inn right down the road from the Omaha airport. Technically we were in Iowa, so my kids thought it was funny that we kept crossing the state lines over and over :)

We made it to Omaha!

Getting settled in :)

After unpacking and getting settled in, we ventured out to the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, which goes over the river connecting Iowa and Nebraska. We took a lot of pictures crossing the state line :) It was nice to get some energy out after being in the car all day! 

It's so hard to get the kids to look at the camera for pictures lately...

Two states at one time!

The sunset and landscape were beautiful!

We found the troll under the bridge! My son wanted absolutely nothing to do with him 😂

But he found some other statues he liked instead :)

My daughter saw this sign and exclaimed "Disney World!" 😂

For dinner, we weren't too hungry after the pizza for lunch, so we ended up eating the picnic we packed for lunch that we didn't eat. But of course, we managed to save room for some ice cream! We checked out Ted & Wally's which I saw in my trip research had excellent reviews. It did not disappoint! I don't remember the flavors we got, but it was delicious, homemade ice cream!

He was scared of the troll, but was very excited to get his picture with this bull 😂

Haha look how she's so lovingly looking at her ice cream!

😂 haha this smile! What the heck!

After that, we decided to turn in for the night after a long travel day!

Friday, October 22, 2021

We were all looking forward to this day as we had plans to visit the Omaha Zoo! Our hotel had a nice continental breakfast, so we enjoyed that before heading out for the day.

We had to make a couple stops for some essentials on our way- bottled water and contact solution (you know, important things you don't realize you're running low on until you're on a trip...).

Anyway, we made it to the zoo around 9:15 or so and we had reservations for the IMAX movie at 10:00, so we stuck close to the front and explored the Lied Jungle building. We all agreed, that was our favorite part of the zoo!

Excited to start our day!

Next we saw an IMAX movie on the Great Barrier Reef. It was a really neat movie and actually my daughter's first "movie" in a theatre :) Of course, it's hard for kids to sit still for 45 minutes, so it was a good thing we were in the back in a row to ourselves!

After the movie we finished off the front of the zoo and explored the Desert Dome building and the Scott Aquarium! It was amazing to us how many different exhibits they had at this zoo- we loved it!

I thought it was fun they decorated the tanks for Halloween!

My son brought his camera and took a lot of pictures himself too!

We ended up going back to our car to eat a picnic that we brought (after we bought some popcorn, of course!) and just relax a little bit. Then back into the zoo to do the big loop of animals. We were most excited to see the elephants because we don't have them at our zoo at home :) We also ran into an old coworker of my husbands who was there too for MEA break with his family! Small world!

We went to the jungle building one more time on our way out because we all loved it so much! Then we got a few souvenirs on our way out. We let each of the kids pick something out, and we added to our travel magnet collection as well. (We always get magnets from our travels and its fun to see our fridge filling up!)

So cute when they hold hands! 😍

Absolutely exhausted!

We decided for dinner this night to get take out from Orsi's Italian Bakery, which was another highly rated restaurant I found in my research. It was so good! We got a pizza, cheese bread, and cannolis to bring back to our hotel with us. mmmmm!

Hawaiian is always our pizza of choice- no hate! ;)

And that was basically our night- eating pizza in bed watching TV :) It was vacation after all!

That wraps up part 1 of our trip! Please join me next week as I share part 2! Thank you for following along!