February 20, 2014
Day 47: Kountze to Shepherd: Laney the Lucky Lab
Doug McArthur is one of our favourite singers. Though living near Ottawa, he has spent a lot of time in the USA and has some great songs about history and conditions here. This is from the song Lone Star.
Spring it comes so easy in the Hill Country
Barbecue and blossoms beneath the pecan tree
The lovers who have partners are up in Barton Spring
Rolling in the long grass whispering secret things
The boys down at Greune Hall are warming up the band
You can hear the coolers popping you can hear the screen door slam
And the lovers without partners are holding up the bar
Up behind the water tank you can see an evening star
Lone Star Keep Shining
Lone Star Shine on me
There’s no more cane on the Brazos just a big Dow Chemical town
The Yellow Rose of Texas is a faded rusty brown
At the field of San Jacinto the big refineries glow
Its hard to see a single star at the flood-lit Alamo
I’m following the Lone Star with a pistol in my hand
I’m pulling on cowboy boots for reasons I don’t understand
The shade of old Sam Houston is sadly looking down
And the dust of Davy Crockett is blowing all around
Yesterday was some kind of milestone, because I went swimming - outside! We were in a motel (again), in Kountze. Our room at the back faced the pool, and though the water was quite cold the air was warm. Refreshing! The poolside location turned out to be a disadvantage because it attracted some partying guests late in the evening. After an hour or two, knowing we had to wake up extra early as part of our program of making it to Anderson by Saturday morning, Dodie went out and shushed them.
Meanwhile, to ensure a nice sleep I went into a hot bath. I came out, turned out the lights, and in principle the next stop would be early morning. Nope. Here was somebody vacuuming in the corridor outside. I got up, turned on the lights, opened the door and attempted to shush them. But this was not ordinary overzealous cleaning. Rather my draining bathtub had flooded the corridor. They were trying to wet/dry vac suck it up.
We got moved to another room. Yeah! All new coffee, towels, and shampoo. We collapsed, and all too soon now, it was morning.
Often wind is calm in the morning, only picking up around 10 a.m. But this morning it was blowing from the start. No matter, it was a tailwind to us, and we sailed off down the highway. We had sailed for a while when Dodie spied a route sign. Route 69/287? No, no. We need farm road 1293. So back we went, this time not sailing but beating against the wind.
Finally, we got to start our planned big day.
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Actually it was quite easy to reach our planned stop at Shepherd. For most of the way we had a good shoulder, though there were many log trucks on the roads. The roads generally were straight, cutting through the Big Thicket. The view from the road was pretty much straight forest. And yes, there was pine and hardwood and thickety underbrush, but mostly it looked pretty normal.
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Close to Kountze we got chased by dogs twice. After the second one, Dodie was almost in tears - her hands shaking as she tried to replace her whip to its place under the map case. "I just can't take this anymore" she said. We decided that we would try to take more control of the situation by taking the advice of some people in the guestbook, and turning to fight, rather than run. To do this, we needed some practice with the pepper spray. Ideally, that would take being chased on the road by a small enough dog for it to be a less risky test case.
So now we pedalled along instead of our usual - counting beer cans - now looking for the right test dog to attack us. We passed a lot of likely houses - tumble down, wrecked cars in the yard, no fence, but just to be perverse, none had any dogs! Then we passed some really vicious dogs - but well fenced. Then some moderately vicious ones with a dicey fence. But no one managed to mount an attack. As we passed into the deep forest, there were no houses and we stopped looking for or worrying about dogs. Great.
But, when we got close to Shepherd, here were three loose dogs in front of a house. Each of them put on a good show, but only the smallest, an ideal "ragmop" little cur, actually came after us. As we shouted at it, the owner came to the door. "He don't bite" she called. "If that thing doesn't get back off the road", Dodie called back, "It's going to get Maced". The owner replied by just going back in the house. So Dodie fired. Her pretty pink weapon produced a whimpy, fine, and short spray. You would need the aggressor within a foot or two for it to do anything. At four feet, the test dog was safe.
Clearly, if we are going to continue this fight, if we are going to keep Dodie on the route, we will need to look for heavier weaponry. Wow, strange language from the pacifist Grampies!
Something else happened in the dog category today. (Who would have thought DOG would rank so high among all the topics that can come up in a touring blog). While we were going along, just daring some dog to attack us, a young and friendly black lab silently popped up and began running with us. Oh no, not again. Go away, doggie!
Dodie tried waving her whip at the lab, we tried stopping and hoping it would wander off, we tried really speeding up when it would get distracted and stop to sniff something. No luck.This tears it, I thought. No matter how this turns out, Dodie is going to pull the plug.
Just then a pickup pulled up beside us. "Is that y'all dawg?" asked the driver, who turned out to be Jason. "No, but she's very sweet, would you like to take her, pleese!" was our reply. "I think it's actually my dawg", he said. So the truck pulled over and we learned that the dog, Laney, had been missing for two days. Jason was just out to go into town at Livingston, when he came across us. Laney is actually his 13 year old daughter's dog, though they have not had her (the dog) long.
Though Laney is the name that the daughter gave, no specific spelling had been thought about. So we are officially designating it to be "Laney". This very happy ending has balanced the dog account, for today anyway. Good dog and bad dog touring ended in a tie!
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We will again shoot for an early start tomorrow. To get a jump on it, and also be a little further down the road, we bypassed the recommended camping in Shepherd and came to what the ACA map called the America's Best motel, but which is now branded the Home Towner Inn. It turned out to have an extra benefit, because the region was hit by violent thunderstorms just at what would have been setting up the tent time.
But, when we walked in to the motel room, it had a strange smell. Often motel rooms smell weird, with the most common being the smell of cigarettes. But this was strangely fresh smelling. "Smells like insecticide", said I, "we'd better try checking for bed bugs". I pulled away a cushion from a two seater sofa, and there were little black apple seed sized things. "Aha", I exclaimed, (who has never seen a bed bug). "No, no", Dodie corrected, "that's mouse poo". She was right, as shown by the fact that a mouse then ran in front of me and under the dresser.
Now, on our farm the cats bring in lots of mice, and we have found nests and droppings in drawers more than once. We still think it's a pretty nice house. But this was a bit much. So I went back to the office, to see if the lady had a mouse trap. She offered us another room. I went to check it out - in a quite different part of the building. Pulled the sofa cushion - same evidence! There is really no other place on route for us to shift to. But the lady then gave a 10% discount, while denying she had ever had a complaint like this.
Ah, so what about the weird smell? We found every horizontal furniture surface covered in a liquidy layer of what we hope was Lemon Pledge. So we soaped up some wash cloths and degreased the surfaces, drying with toilet paper and bath towels. Except that the bed is too grotty to sleep in the room is great. Really. It is extremely large and well appointed. We will just sleep in our sleeping bags, maybe on the floor. It'll be fine!
Today's ride: 90 km (56 miles)
Total: 2,778 km (1,725 miles)
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