Flashback: Omaha Weekends 2002-03

Today I continue my looks back to the pre-blogging era of 2002-2003. Today I’ll take a look back at some of those crazy trips the gang took to Omaha during Liz Burke’s Creighton days.

After a wild 2002 summer of working at Valleyfair, I had made many great friends that I didn’t want to lose contact with, and there were many weekend trips to visit various friends at their colleges. I was back and forth to Minneapolis every few weeks to visit Luke, Patrick, and Casey. And twice that fall/winter, we got the gang together to road trip down to Omaha, Nebraska to stay at Liz Burke’s house for the weekend.

I think Liz began the fall of 2002 as a junior living off campus with three other girls—Allison, Judy, and Kristi—on a house off Turner Blvd, which seemed to be in a ghetto part of town. The gang would come down on a Friday afternoon after classes and stay till Sunday. The girls would usually throw a big house party and I became acquaintances with lots of the Creighton crowd. Of course another fellow Valleyfair co-worker Rachel Medrano also went to school there.

The first time we visited, I drove down by myself while Luke, Patrick, and Casey rode together from Minneapolis. The next time we came down a few months later, I brought Chris Ahrendt along for the ride as he also had a bunch of high school friends, including Brian Hardie, who went to Creighton. Over the next year I think we made two more trips to Omaha to visit.

While the nights were rowdy, the Saturday afternoons were usually a grab bag of random Omaha specialties, including breakfast at Lisa’s Radial Cafe, lunch at some Chinese buffet, and afternoons shopping Omaha’s finest thrift stores.

By the time Liz graduated in the spring of 2004, I think I had made a total of five weekend trips there, and also stopped by a sixth time on our way to Las Vegas for spring break 2004. Many other friends joined in the fun on later trips, including Colin, Joe Allen, Mike Carlson, Amy Adelmann, Nick Sandbulte, and many others. Those Omaha parties truly were way more fun than any parties I ever went to at DSU. It of course helped that the male-to-female ratio wasn’t completely lopsided.

Here are some classic pictures from our visits there in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003!