Day 32 – Patriots won the Super Bowl! Time well spent in town watching the game.
Day 33
Daily Miles: 70
Total Miles: 1720
The riding today was really good. I followed the Guadeloupe River for a while and started to climb into the mountains. I peaked at an elevation of around 2,500 feet today which is the highest so far. There was some really serious climbing today; steep and long and exhausting. The first one was so insane I couldn’t make the mile climp up and had to get off and walk the rest of the way. The slope was just crazy.
Going down, the descents were equally quite terrifying. They were just as steep and turny and curvy as the ascents. I had to put my breaks on almost the whole way down the big ascents just to stop myself from going too fast and flinging myself off a cliff.
I finally made it to the town of Leaky late afternoon/ early evening. There was supposed to be a campground but it had closed down. I went to the RV park to see if they would let me camp there and the guy pretty much said no. He told me to try this biker place just down the road which was also a restaurant. The place was closing up when I got there and the owner was driving away. She saw me and stopped.
“Can I help you?”
“Just wondering if you would allow me to camp on your back lawn tonight. The campground was closed here and I just need a place to sleep tonight.”
She looked at all the nice grass in the back of the restaurant and then turned back to me. “Well, we don’t have a restroom or any facilities…”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “The woods work good.”
“I can’t really have you camp back there.” She said, kind of uncomfortable.
“I’ll go to the bathroom in town if that’s what your worried about,” I joked, and tried to give a good smile, knowing that I was blowing this interaction. I was too tired to work any amount of cunning or charm into this request.
“I’m sorry- I just can’t. There’s a lady that rents cabins just next store. You might try there.”
Strike two. I was starting to get a little frustrated. I went to the cabin place and the office was closed with a phone number to call. There’s no cell service in this town so that wasn’t going to work.
I rode back to town and just pedaled around the side streets looking for anything, a park, cemetery, woods. Everything was fenced in and there was nowhere to stealth camp whatsoever. I rode by the only church in town and no one was there. There wasn’t even a place to camp there anyway.
I rode around while it was starting to get dark and felt lonely and homeless, not sure what to do. There was an Inn nearby and that was my last resort. I had avoided going there because I didn’t want to pay for another hotel room. But now I didn’t have a choice. I got to the inn and the office was closed with a phone number to call. What’s with all these people? Everyone has a business but nobody works. Luckily there was a phone outside that you could use to make the phone call.
I called the owners and said I wanted a room. The place looked pretty empty so I pushed a little to get the price down and I was able to get 10 dollars off. The lady on the phone said the housekeeper would be there momentarily to check me in.
The housekeeper came and she didn’t speak any English. It was hard to communicate with each other but we made it work after combining what little Spanish I knew and what little English she knew, in combination with hand gestures and writing on a post-it note.
It was a long and frustrating end of the day, but it’s okay. This is why backpacking is so much better. There’s always a place to camp in the woods. There’s too much private land everywhere as a cyclist, especially in Texas. It’s very annoying and aggravating. But what are you going to do? Take what you can get I suppose and move on.
