Day One: Ridgeland MS to Wichita Falls, Texas.

Day one, 546 miles/880 km (too much)

Wichita FaIls, Texas, 9 pm. This was one hell of a long ride and  I am too tired to go get some dinner. Luckily I had a half a chicken wrap at MacDonald’s around 7 pm, so now I can make do with an apple and a cookie. All I want is shower and to sleep.

This leg took longer than I expected, which means I planned for the time riding and not for all the stops for gas and food along the way, the delays caused by rain (got some of that), traffic (damn the Dallas freeways) and fatigue. I should have left at 7 but decided to leave at 8, which means I ended up leaving at 9. Getting the hard cases to close with the soft bags inside turned out to be a chore the first time and I blew at least 30 minutes just doing that. It was past nine when I rolled down the street, too busy thinking about all the gear I had, the headset, the GPS and all the other junk, that I pretty much forgot I was beginning a great trip, something I have been talking about for along time. I need to remember this next time.

I took the Natchez Trace down to the 20 under heavy, gray skies. It was hot and muggy, and I was wearing the rain layer, since I knew sooner or later those gray skies would do more than look threatening.  About an hour and a half later one of the great, dark billowing cloud opened up and for a few minutes it rained so hard I could barely see. Then, as I got off the freeway to stop at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast, it stopped raining.  For the next hour on the road, it rained on and off again, a warm mist raising from the hot asphalt, until the gray clouds lost their strength and I rolled on to the West Texas landscape under cleaner skies.

Green Fields

Jurassic Park, with Power Boat (Pearl River, MS)

Rolling through MS and Louisiana and even  Eastern Texas, all is green, intensely so, everywhere you look . Whatever is not covered by cement or asphalt, is green. In this part of the country human presence seems almost like an interruption, a temporary setback for the Jurassic roots of the land, deep in green, hot, humid, a tamed environment but barely so. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we stopped trimming the bushes, cutting the trees, mowing the fields, laying more cement. Within a few years the ancestral jungle would return to claim its own, unfettered by Man, drowning everything in a green embrace, ancient beast and insects reining once more.

Dallas, the Mad City

I could summarize my experience driving through Dallas by simply saying I will NEVER go through there again. I was going to take the same route going back, but not anymore. It was hot, 92 F, humid, and I was lost in a mad man’s dream of city planning, caught in the spaghetti like freeway complex, more roads and options and numbers and lanes than you can possible imagine, and people clogging the ever growing number of roads and lanes even on a Saturday afternoon. Were it not for the GPS, I think I would be caught in Dallas for the rest of my life, doomed to move from freeway ring to freeway ring but never escaping the all-powerful presence of this city, a unwilling satellite in a world of steel and asphalt, all seven rings  of hell and no place to pull over.

At one point, the traffic crawling to a stop and the temperature raising (it was 2 PM) and my having no clue where I was outside of trusting that the damned GPS knew where I was, I had to pull over under an overpass, get my helmet off and drink some water or I was afraid I would pass out in the heat.

When I finally found my way out of that mess, I found myself caught in miles of road under construction, until the 287 to Wichita opened up and I rode on, Dallas behind for good, a numbing fatigue pushing me on.