Open Miles: Texas Mud

Day 4: Leakey to Brakettville, TX:

It rained. All night. Luckily, both the bikes were in a building so they were nice and dry. That still couldn't help TJ's bad luck though - flat #7,932:

The greatest thing about staying at the church was the kitchen. Instead of setting up the camp stove, we fired up a real stove a cooked a certified feast. Six eggs, veggies, cheese, tortillas, and two glasses of milk. Too much food...

The bad thing about Leakey is that it's positioned right at the foot of a climb. As if that wasn't enough to wake us up, it was also about 40 degrees and raining. I thought Texas was supposed to be hot!

Never had I been so happy that I decided to buy a bike with disc brakes than when we reached the top of this climb. Descending a mountain in the rain with a trailer - super dangerous.

The rain finally tapered off and it turned into a pretty beautiful day for riding bikes. We ditched the Guadalupe River in exchange for the Nueces River, which we zigzagged over for a few miles:

GO LEFT

When we were finally hungry for lunch, we found a pretty awesome spot at the top of a climb. In the middle of nowhere, off the road, with free mountain views. Can't beat that:

Ridiculous panorama:

On the topic of flat tires, I regretfully got my first flat today - the trailer tire. I was so disgruntled over it, that I obstinately rode for about 50 miles with it flat. The tire was worthless anyway...and it will make my legs bigger...or something like that.

Notice the fencing (there's always a fence) - it's weird to think someone owns this:

Want some land?

Eventually we turned off of the quite farm road onto a "busier" road...and guess what we found - a bridge!

At this point the road actually started to flatten out, which was a huge relief. Could it be? Are the hills really behind us? Well it's about time...TJ tired

We decided to call it a day in Brackettville, another strange, quite town in the middle of nowhere. The best part? Our last few miles of flat road were solidified - no longer on the Hill Country Trail, we're on the Pecos Trail!

After riding around Brackettville for a while we found Fort Clark - a once military fort turned gated community. They had a secluded area that we setup camp in, with a fire pit to boot! We cooked a tasty dinner of pasta, broccoli, black beans, and cheese:

Oh yeah, Texas Mud? That's a tale for another day.

Miles Crushed: 75

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Day 3: Kerrville to Leaky, TX:

Thanks to Fred, we kicked off today in style - a huge mound of delicious banana pancakes. After TJ patched flat #634, we hit the road for a deceivingly beautiful 20 mile ride along the Guadalupe river. Why so deceiving, you ask? Our gloriously flat bike ride led us straight to the foot of some monstrous climbs...but what better way to shock your body into touring shape than to hit all the hills right out of the gate?

Some shots from the first 20 miles:

We'll call this "The Day of the Dips." Apparently in Texas, bridges do not exist. Instead of spending money on bridges, Texas just bought a whole bunch of road signs that say "Dip." More accurately, these signs should all be replaced with something like "Screw You." You see, where ever there is a "Dip," it is immediately followed by a massive downhill to a creek, and then a massive uphill to bring the road right back to where it began. So what happens when the creek floods with water? Don't worry, they have a sign for that too.

Check out these hills!

Good thing there was no traffic on these roads...

That is the wonderful thing about being in the middle of nowhere in Western Texas - we traveled miles and miles on quite ranch roads without another person in sight. Just us and some huge views:

Now as far as I'm concerned, New England has a few advantages over Texas. Not only are people in New England moderately less obsessed with gigantic pickup trucks, nothing beats the foliage in New England. Have you ever seen a cactus in October? It look like, well, a cactus...very disappointing. So when TJ and I heard about this place called Lost Maples that contains over 2,000 acres of maple trees that actually change color, we had to check it out.

On the way to the park, we made two friends - a pair of deer (maybe not deer?) that ran for their lives for about 15 miles down the winding road. The weird thing about Texas is that all the land immediately off the roads are private fenced ranches. This is fine for us - there's usually a ton of cacti over there anyway. But it's terrible for animals that are scared of us. If they can't jump the fence, they're going to be running for a long time. Unfortunately these guys were too quick for us, so we couldn't grab a picture.

Just outside the park we finally received some payoff for all of our climbing efforts - massive downhill:

On to Lost Maples

Unfortunately Fall is running a little late down here, so we beat the leaves by a few weeks. Although the park itself was beautiful, this was the closest thing we came to foliage:

More scenes from the park:

After a scrumptious lunch at the park, we headed West towards Leaky, TX where we decided to stop for the day. We headed straight for the grocery store to procure supplies for dinner where a women named Becky started talking to us. She called her Pastor and asked if he had space for us to spend the night, and lucky enough he invited us over to the church. Not only did he let us stay on the church grounds, but he bought us a huge Mexican meal at Mama Chole's (Leaky is very small - that's one of two restaurants in the town).