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Day 3: April 7 (Sat) | Bastrop State Park | 21 miles today / 42 miles total We screw around and don't leave until 2:45pm. And wouldn't you know it, today we're heading mostly southeast and there's a strong south wind blowing right into us. You know the wind is bad when you barely pick up any speed when you're going down a hill! After about 15 miles we stop at a pecan shop just outside of Bastrop and get some pecans. Lara's having an easier time of it, but it's by no means easy for her. I'm still helping her up hills. We're still crawling along, maybe 6mph or less. I tell Lara that if this is too much, we could pick a closer destination, or turn around and go back to Austin, and maybe hang out at the farm for a while along the way. She likes the idea of picking a closer destination. I check the maps and do some math: New Orleans is about halfway to Florida,which we could get to at about 30miles/day. Or we could get to Baton Rouge at about 22 miles/day. Even that seems ambitious at this rate, and I worry that Lara will be dead in a few days, but we press on. A few miles down the road we get to Bastrop State Park -- courtesy of Lara; I read the map wrong and we would have missed our turn had she not figured it out. (Incidentally, there's a big golf course at the front of this park that was built on endangered species habitat, and my friend Danny Dolinger was arrested when he chained himself to a bulldozer to protest the golf course's construction in the mid 90's. And coincidentally, Danny and Kale used to be a couple.) The park has a sign up saying that all campsites are full, but it's nightfall and we have nowhere else to go, so we try to find a place to camp inside the park. Lara comes through again, finding the RV camping area, complete with bathrooms and showers. Before we started the trip Lara had suggested that when we get to Florida, that I take the bus to Miami with her (where her plane leaves) so we could hang out in Miami for a few days, if we had time. She made this suggestion just hours after she got to Austin. I suggested that maybe she should see how she felt in a month, because she might be totally annoyed at me by then. Well, today, just a few days into it, she did get a bit annoyed with me. For example, she says that my continuous "unfunny humor" is mentally draining, she doesn't like how we decided the route, and we have a little fight when she criticizes my fire-building skills but won't tell me why she thinks my method won't work. But everything seems to be better once we've eaten and are settled in. It was fun camping our first night. It wouldn't have helped us to begun our day earlier to get more miles in because Lara's tapped out now anyway. We went only about the same distance as yesterday -- 21 miles, far from the 60 we'd need to do to get to Florida. But the difference was that Lara wasn't completely defeated by the day's travel, just tapped out. Of course I still have to reflect that it's taken us four days to go 42 miles -- which I could do in about four hours. I consider that if we just stop screwing around and start the biking each day at reasonable times (like, before noon), then we might be able to do two trips per day, with a big rest in the middle, and then Florida might not be out of the question -- and Baton Rouge or Louisiana would certainly be doable. Lara thinks the biking will get easier for her and says we press on, so we'll just see what happens. Day 4: April 8 (Sun) | Outside Smithville | 15 miles today / 57 miles total We don't head out until 2:00pm, but at least that's the earliest time we've started our day so far. We're heading into the wind again, great. After just a few miles, we pull over at a rest stop and Lara lies down on a picnic table. I get out a Thermarest for her. While she's resting, I move half of the gear from her bike to mine, so mine is overloaded like a tank now. We take off again, and at the 15-mile mark for the day we find a hotel, between cities. It's another 18 miles to La Grange, which has hotels, but there aren't any more hotels before La Grange, so it's either stop now or keep going -- and another 18 miles is out of the question when the 15 we just did was a struggle. So we check into the hotel. Even Baton Rouge seems like an impossibility now -- the 15 miles we did today was our worst yet (besides our slack day), and we've never once hit the 22/day we'd need to do from here on out in order to get to Baton Rouge on time. I'm wondering again whether we should turn around, but Lara doesn't express any interest in doing that. Lara and I hit the hot tub and the pool immediately. The hotel provides these free cheesy postcards, which are silly for a number a reasons. First of all, the place where you'd write is mostly taken up by an ad for the freakin' hotel. Second, they have a swimsuit model in the picture of the pool! Like anyone's gonna go to a hotel in the middle of nowhere off a state highway because there's some babe in the photo! So Lara and I took pictures of each other by the pool, trying to recreate the model in the postcard photo. We asked if we could wash our clothes in the hotel's laundry room, but they wanted to charge us five dollars! We said forget it. We'll wait until another opportunity. The good thing about the hotel was that we got to watch the new X-Files where Mulder is finally back. See, Mulder is all like, "Are you John Doggett?", and when Doggett starts to get up Mulder pushes him back into his chair, and Doggett's all like, "Excuse me?" And then there's all this conspiracy and stuff. It was neat. I'm a little miffed because Lara spent three hours on the computer, leaving me barely any time to reply to email, but I don't say anything. I shouldn't let things like that bother me. It's no big deal in the scheme of things. Day 5: April 9 (Mon) | Round Top | 37 miles today / 94 miles total We made the earliest start yet, 12:00 noon. Lara had had the continental breakfast at the hotel, which included coffee. I don't know if it was the coffee or the Super Sugar Crisp cereal, but she was fucking wired. We were still going into the wind, but Lara was smiling and grooving on her bike seat to invisible music, and attacking the hills, and yelling "Whoooo!" Oh, and singing ZZ Top's "La Grange" song, since she's very excited to be going to the place named in the song. (All day she's been going, "DA na na na na na, na NAH na...!") She barely needed any help on the hills. In fact, it was hard to help her, because I have to be able to go a lot faster than her in order to be able to do the hill assist (since assisting slows me down a lot), and the disparity between us is narrowing. By 2:30, we've done the 18 miles into La Grange! Heck, we didn't even start yesterday until 2:00, and we've already beaten yesterday's mileage total! We're averaging 7.5mph, which is still relatively slow, but put into perspective, it's 25% faster than than 6mph. Also, Lara's not toally defeated as she's been on previous days, although it's still physically challenging. In La Grange I buy her some Ben Gay and she's amazed at how well it works. I also buy her a magazine at the checkout of "Country Music's Sexiest Men", which she really liked. We get a large veggie pizza at Pizza Hut and eat the whole thing. I put "La Grange" on the jukebox six times for Lara, but it only plays once. (Maybe the pizza people overrode it, probably getting sick of tourists playing the hell out of it.) Lara's not shy at all -- she asks the guy to crank up the volume while it's playing, and she starts grooving in the booth. On the way out of town we take photos of the La Grange Middle School sign (only because we were worried it might be the last La Grange sign we saw), but then further on we saw the city limit sign, so we took another photo there. Leaving La Grange, our route changed from southeast to northeast, putting the wind behind us instead of in front of us, and that made a big difference. We did another 19 miles to Round Top (pop. 81, another 19 miles past La Grange), and got to the campground, but they said they were closed because they were trying to take it easy after a busy weeklong antique fair in the area. I explained that we had no place to go and asked if we could just set up our tent. The clerk asked, "Are you cross-country people?" and for some reason I was tempted to say, "No, no, no! We're Methodists!" But I did confirm that we were cross-country folks, and they allowed us to set up our tent. Dinner was a 5-lb. bag of mixed frozen vegetables which I bought at a grocery in La Grange -- it was mostly thawed by the time we set up camp. And we were so hungry we ate about 4.5 lbs of it. We did 37 miles today, nearly twice what we did on any previous day. Lara's a little sore but she's very upbeat. At this rate, we can easily get to Baton Rouge. P.S. Lara just got bitten by fire ants and is having an allergic reaction -- her face and glands are swollen and she's a bit uncomfortable. Day 6: April 10 (Tue) | Independence | 37 miles today / 131 miles total "Hay's not very tasty" Things have been rough. Shortly after we went to bed last night, Lara complained that I had passed gas and made the tent stinky. I didn't think that I had. A while later she woke me up and made that same complaint. Then I couldn't sleep for fear that I'd do that unconsciously once I fell asleep. Lara was sniffling and making groaning noises and I felt like a leper, so I got out of the tent and slept outside, where fire ants promptly ate up my hand. In the morning Lara doesn't have much to say. The bathhouse is locked, so Lara tries to climb in through the window, the owner's rep sees her and calls out to her not to break in. Lara actually might have gotten away with breaking in had she done so on the opposite side of the bathhouse, which wasn't visible to the owner's house, but Lara chose the visible side because that was the ladies' side! After we pack up I go to the owner's house and offer to pay a camping fee but they decline, and they say the reason the bathhouse was closed was that the antique fair crowd had overloaded the septic system. Lara is really upset that she didn't get to shower. We ride the quarter-mile into town so Lara can try to get coffee, but the few places are all closed, and now Lara is really upset. I ask her what she wants to do, but she won't say. Lara fiddles with her gear, and I'm waiting to hear what she wants to do, and she says, "Don't look at me!" I go to the phone to check on the availability of the bed & breakfast in Independence, and they say they have one room available. I tell them I'll call in an hour or so if we need to reserve it, because at this point I don't know whether Lara even wants to go on with the trip. I ask Lara about what she wants to do, and her response is cold. Okay, we can't work like this -- this is not fun any more. So I tell Lara that she's making me feel bad and unrespected. She replies, "I don't make you feel any particular way. How you choose to feel is up to you." This really infuriates me, but I remain composed. I reply that okay, I feel that you're not treating me with respect. Lara explains that her moaning last night was not because of me, but rather because she was uncomfortable from a stomach ache and the fire ant bites, and that "It's not always about you." She starts crying, and then says she hates being exposed like that where people can see her, although there's nobody around and barely any traffic. But I park my bike and take her bike from her to lean it up, and then lead her back behind the one-room chamber of commerce building so she can have some privacy. We sit on the back step. Lara says she's upset because she didn't sleep well and feels icky because she didn't get to shower and is caked in sunscreen from the previous day. I was having a hard time dealing with her up until this point because she had seemed to be directing her unhappiness towards me, but now that I no longer feel like the target, it's easier for me to empathize with her and try to console her. I mention as always that I'm completely flexible about our travel plans and that anything she wants to do, or not do, is fine with me. I ask what I can do for her. She says, "Turn off the sun." So I pick up a realty sign and hold it over her to shade her. Then I get a clean rag and find a water faucet, which miraculously gives warm water, and I give Lara a sponge bath while she's sitting on the step (arms, hands, neck, face). She says she's ready to press on, so we do. It seems the worst is behind us. We head out on the bikes. After a few miles there are some large, round bales of hay very close to the road, so I take a picture of Lara on top of one. Lara comments, "Hay's not very tasty." In Burton we stop at a diner to get some drinks. I try to call the bed & breakfast, and leave a voicemail message saying that we definitely want the room for tonight. We set out again, and when we see a sign for Brenham, I explain about the famed Blue Bell ice cream from Brenham, though we of course won't have any since we're vegan. But when we get to Independence, the freezer section has Blue Bell rainbow popsicles which are just water, sugar, and coloring, so we have a couple of those, and they're really tasty. (We'll continue to have these throughout the trip.) At the bed & breakfast, the proprietor (Velma Zweiner) tells us that she doesn't think we'll be happy there and suggests we go to Brenham, which has motels, but is 10 miles away. We explain that even 10 more miles is more than we care to ride after riding all day, and that we couldn't get there before dark. She lets us see the room, and it's really lovely. I go back and tell her that we'd like to take it, but she says she's found a note from her son saying that he wants the room tonight for himself and a fraternity friend. She suggests we go to the Heartland Inn, just a few miles up the road, and she calls the proprietor there (Shirley Sacks) to make sure she can take us first. We bike over to Heartland. It turns out to be farther than it was supposed to be -- about six or more miles. Heck, with that distance we might as well have biked to Brenham and saved a few bucks -- Heartland is going to be $85/night. I mention to Lara along the way that maybe I'll be able to do some websites for any of the places we stay at, and offset the cost. This comment proves to be prescient. Heartland turns out to be a retreat center, specializing in church retreats and corporate conferences -- with seven houses sleeping up to 200 guests. Most of their business is on the weekends, and right now, we're the only guests on the entire premises. They give us a massive house to stay in -- with an enormous kitchen and dining area. It's not just large, it's very cozy, with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and antique accessories. The proprietor is Shirley Sacks, 72, who started Heartland twelve years ago over the objections of her husband (now deceased). As we check in, she asks what I do. Now, I never know what to say when people ask me that, because I haven't held a regular job in years, and I'm restless as far as my other projects go. But most of my project work revolves around websites that I publish either as a public service or for my own amusement, so considering that, plus my earlier idea of doing websites for hire while we're on the road, when Shirley asked what I did, I said, "I design websites," without missing a beat. This excited her, because they'd contracted with a designer months ago to upgrade their site, but he'd been dragging his feet and hadn't produced anything for them at all. I agreed to consult with her about it the next day. It also turns out that Shirley also has an interest in natural foods, so she set us up with some soymilk and other goodies. I made veggie burgers from scratch, which she was really excited about -- she wrote down my recipe and quizzed me about every aspect of them. We did 37 miles again today, the second day in a row. We continue to average 7.5mph on the bikes. Day 7: April 11 (Wed) | (Independence) | 0 miles today / 131 miles total It turns out that Shirley needs more done to her website than I can do in a few hours, so Shirley offers to let us stay the following night as her guest, which we agree to. Lara's enjoying the nice house, the scenery, and the break, anyway, and besides it's raining in the morning which precludes our leaving in any event. Heartland has several Internet problems. First, their website is as ugly and hard to use as any that I've ever seen. It's got a screwy, impossible to understand navigation system, you have to search like crazy for crucial information like the email address and phone number, the map is completely illegible, the email address isn't linked (you can't click it), and it's spelled wrong on the "Contact Us" page. Oh, and the Contact Us form is broken. And the site hasn't been updated in a year and a half. Second, their email is set up wrong so that when they send out email, replies go somewhere else, not back to Heartland. Third, they don't know any of their passwords or login information. Finally, they're paying way too much for their webhosting. It takes me most of the day just to track down their various server & password information, since their host (PointeCom) is nearly impossible to contact. I start the redesign of the site. That night, we hear a heated domestic argument in the house behind ours, where Arturo (the groundskeeper / maintenance person / maid) lives with his wife and children. They're arguing in Spanish, which we don't understand. The eldest daughter (about 17?) is outside, crying. I go out and ask if she understands English, and she says yes. I ask if she needs someone to talk to, or would like to take a walk, and she says no. I ask if she'd be more comfortable talking to my friend Lara, and she says yes. I get Lara, who brings her back to our house. The daughter explains the problem in Spanish, and then goes home. Lara and I feel pretty helpless. Shortly thereafter, all the kids (three of them) plus the mother are outside crying. I go out and invite them to come over to our house if they need a place to get away to.