This is the story of the third installment in my effort to visit all 254 counties in Texas on motorcycles. I find that it is gradually morphing from a lark into some kind of inner exploration. Spending 10-12 hours a day on, or getting on and off of, a motorcycle affords large amounts of time for pondering what one is seeing, and how one feels about it.
Here’s the circuit, in dark green:
While I’m not especially interested in courthouse architecture per se, I’m finding that there was an unconscious wisdom in having arbitrarily selected the courthouses as reference points. While the purpose of these trips is to “see” the state of Texas, it would in fact all turn into a stream of consciousness blur without the courthouses to give the trip a structure and focus. And I’m finding that each little county seat gives rise to a unique perspective on Texas that I would not get if the only stops were to take pictures or get gas.
Before embarking on this trip, I was expecting it to be fairly bland – just miles and miles of flat and featureless land. In fact, while there is lots of flatness, there is a great deal of nuance in the landscape, its features, and what people are doing on it. I was enthralled the entire time…
The trip was educational in more ways than one. I got a crash course in the brutality of North Texas winds, which I will address in a separate section of this blog so as not to contaminate the travelogue with my whining about the pounding I took while on this trip. On most bike trips, the biking is the best part (travel is not about the destination, it’s about the journey, yada yada yada…) – on this trip almost every mile after Dalhart was a brutal battle with the elements, the 18-wheelers, and the laws of physics that apply when you have powerful gusting winds, usually cross-winds, punishing you–and putting you at great risk — every mile you put on the odometer. It was a different kind of biking, and mostly not pleasant, except…
…what differentiates an “adventure” from a “vacation” is the element of risk and uncertainty, and having to overcome obstacles (yes, Hanson, I remember Koraput) in order to get back to start. Solo motorcycle trips are adventures in and of themselves – there’s so much that can happen, benign or otherwise, that turns the ordinary into adversity. This one, however, was more along the category of when I almost drowned while body-surfing huge waves in Mazatlan; or having my car destroyed (Farida and I were in it) while driving through an insurrection in Bamako, Mali; or barely missing getting offed by a vehicle-borne IED in Kabul, Afghanistan; or turning the tables on an aspiring mugger in Monrovia, Liberia. I’m no stranger to living life on the edge, but I had not really expected this trip to land me in that type of adventure. But the great thing about adventures that you survive is…well…that you survive, and you have the indelible recollections of what you made it through.
So. I have so much photographic and memory-based recollection material to work with, I’m breaking this Trip into 4 separate daily bloglets so that it is not overwhelming and indigestible in one sitting. Links to the daily blogs follow:
This was by far the longest of the projected ten trips – primarily because it was over 600 miles from home just to get to the starting point, Dalhart, in the northwest corner of the Panhandle; and then home from the end point in the delightfully named Floydada. It took five days and covered 2,324 miles, and added 34 more counties to the grand total of 78 as of 16 March 2018. Here’s the map after the Panhandle:
Sandy, I am putting in a special request to hear the story of you and the mugger. 😁 When you have time, of course! Ronnie
That will need to be a private conversation. 😀