Today started out a little rough. We were slow to get moving in the morning - who could blame us since we got to bed a little after 3 in the morning. We chatted with Regina and her boyfriend almost until noon before we hit the road. Once on the road, we were equally as slow.
The sky was dark and cloudy. It was very beautiful in a way. I'm not sure why Brian is smiling in this picture. Neither of us were happy campers.
We pretty much had a straight shot to Fort Davis, but for some reason we just couldn't get ourselves into gear. Most of Texas is paved with this awful stuff they call chip seal - or something. It's slow, noisy and generally unpleasant to ride on. You can understand our excitement when we reached the end of this god-awful pavement and moved onto smooth, fast asphalt.
It started to get pretty sunny at some point in the day. I think this is when we tried to pick up the pace but it wasnt happening. I was still feeling very sick anyway.
Even though we were surrounded by mountains, our ride into For Davis was relatively flat.
There was evidence of autumn throughout our ride.
There were also magnificent stone structures all around us.
Texas continues to surprise me. I really have a love-hate relationship with this state. There are parts of it that are just so beautiful.
For instance: this creek. Though, I found my favorite parts of Texas are this that remind me of the north east.
Although we were about to ride back on to that nasty chip seal stuff (you can see off to the bottom left) I was delighted by the changing of the leaves around us.
My favorite stop of the day was at a small picnic area along the road. The colors of autumn were in full effect and the crisp smell in the air had me daydreaming of pumpkins and crunchy leaves.
We couldn't have asked for a more perfect pit stop during our ride.
Here is a view from behind the picnic area.
We finally made it into Firt Davis. The ride was very short - which I didn't mind.
We stopped at the Post. Office so that I could pick up a package of halloween candy that my mother had sent me.
Tumbleweed?
Soon we were on our way again, however. We had anoth 15 miles to go to get to the McDonald Observatory, where we were staying the night.
This part of the ride was definitely hillier.
We had a couple thousand feet to climb and I was not feeling it. I too my time as Brian bolted up the mountain. I was too sick to try to push myself up these switchbacks.
Since I was taking my time, I got to experience a lot more of the journey up the mountain. The views during the climb were phenomenal.
We reached the visitors center at the observatory just before they began to close up shop. After lingering around there for a little bit, we road up the hill some more to find the house that we were staying at for the night. There was no one home, but the door was open. Very strange. We decided to go back to the visitors center and use their phone to call John and see where he was and what we should do. He didn't answer, so we stuck around for a while more while a large group of people gathered around us for the Star Party. After the sun went down, we went back up to the house and set our tent up in a field and cooked ourselves some dinner. At 10 or maybe even a little later, Johns wife pued in the driveway and alwed is in the house. She went to pick up John and when he got back to the house, we all chatted for a little while before calling it a night.
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