Stars at night, Big and Bright

Not going here!

That’s likely because there isn’t a cloud in the sky here in Texas, where I’ve been for the past 3 days, traveling west into the state capital of Austin. I found a little nook and cranny behind a fire hall here in the town of Navasota after not having much success at trying to find a place to sleep close to amenities for the morning – i.e. a place to get some coffee. This place isn’t so bad, I’ve found running water, a power plug, and as I write this there are a herd of 7 deer walking slowly past me, yet none of them have noticed me thus far. Other than the odd possum this is the first wildlife I’ve seen in this state – it’s too damn hot for anything to move here. Texas is in a drought at the moment, crops destroyed for the year, with areas that I’ve passed through not seen rain since January – It’s caused water metering and a burn ban due to the overall dryness of all the trees, grasslands and surrounding areas. Normally this would be fine with me, but I sort of wanted to take advantage of the many fireworks stands that I’ve ridden past in the state of Louisiana and Texas and set off a little light show in celebration to my country’s 144th Birthday. It’s Canada Day, but will be taking it easy I suppose – there is always Independence Day on the 4th, and it will be interesting to see how the United States does it. Where I’m at, I’m imagining cans od Budweiser  being smashed into foreheads with cowboy hats on them, country music blaring and a lot of explosions. I’ve been wrong before..

I’ll be honest and say flat out that mustering up the energy to write or even take photographs in the past week or so has been difficult. I seem to go in cycles where I’m gung ho about one thing for a period of time and then defer the task until later, most of the time way later when my memory has been clouded over. On the photograph front, this has been occurring for almost a year, where I’m only snapping photos of things that really stand out to me – and cutting out the fluff. Usually it is the little things that matter, and I need to realign my priorities a bit going forward. It’s good that I am aware of this – but sometimes dealing with too many tasks gets to be cumbersome. I’ve been pouring my energy and spare time into another project which I’ll talk about in a few weeks, and immensely enjoying it – knowing that I have a deadline to deal with so letting other tasks slide. Everything should be back to normal soon – whatever normal is.

I didn’t make it out of New Orleans when I expected – My friend Brandi who I camped with at the Bonnaroo festival a few weeks back put out the word to her friends in the city to show me a good time, and low and behold it didn’t take too long before the invitations started pouring in. The one I accepted was from a man named Mark, an attorney in the city, interested in construction and dipping his hands into all sorts of other business ventures. He was born and raised in the area, extremely personable, and had a great outlook in life. It showed as when we went out we wouldn’t get more than 10 steps before other residents of the city would notice him, stop him to shake his hand and engage in conversation. Through this I met a good dozen people by proxy who were all very interested to hear about my story and how I came to be in New Orleans. First question was always: “How long are you here for?” – with my response being that I was leaving tomorrow. They laughed and moved onto the next topic. I understand now, as I went through a similar experience a year ago when I was in Yellowknife, all the way at the top of Canada – people coming for a day staying for 2 weeks, or the rest of their life sort of thing. Mark took me to the spots where the locals hung out, and ensured that I had the authentic New Orleans food experience – ranging from Creole Jambalaya – a mish mash of vegetables and meat in a spicy sauce, Crawfish – shrimp like invertebrates boiled in Cajun spice, Po-Boys – a take on the submarine sandwich, Benet’s – A doughy icing sugar overloaded pastry, and a whole other set of unique tastes at a restaurant La Cochon where I experienced the brains of a pig for the first time in my life. It was good! I swear, if I lived in that town I’d be 300 pounds from all the wonderful food loaded with unique spices and variety. He also took me down to the French Quarter, where artists lined their warez up against walls, buskers performed for money for the tourists, and naked women offered face painting to passer-by’s for money asking them to not move while staring at something so that the  makeup didn’t get smudged – best tactic ever. I spent some time working with him wanting to give back something for his generosity and took care of a significant amount of computer work for his business where I noted major deficiencies in security and overall workflow. I stayed way longer than I expected, but not a big deal – I had a wall up and didn’t want to open myself up to New Orleans too much just in case I settled for a long period of time, knowing that I have a schedule to stick to loosely. Mark’s having a baby with his super friendly wife Heidi in 6 months, and it will be interesting to see how he makes out in the future – definitely one of the nicest , most intelligent people I’ve met on my journey so far – It seems good people tend to know good people and I can’t wait to give my friend Brandi a hug in August for the connection.

Heading west is a significant amount of Bayou’s and bridges almost to the tip of Louisiana. Paired with high humidity, heavy traffic and not so many amenities it makes the riding quite difficult – clothes soaked from sweat, or soaked from frequent stops in gas stations bathrooms – taking everything off and putting it in the sink before putting it back on to keep cool in this 100 degree weather. In the west is Cajun country, offering other unique food items, Boudin is a Cow’s Intestine with Meat and Rice stuffed in them, which tasted almost like a cabbage roll to me. The woman who sold some said it was their mildest type, yet it still burned my mouth, something I crave for as I tend to like the hot stuff. It makes for difficult riding in Louisiana due to the glass, trash and small shoulders and I’d have to give it a thumbs down for riding a bicycle through. It’s a pain in the ass to get to New Orleans no matter how you try, but much like the near impossible journey to Yellowknife a wonderful community of good people exist – a city still trying to get back on their feet after Hurricane Katrina in 2004.

Once you cross into the state line of Texas things opened up quite a bit – Huge shoulders big enough to fit almost 2 cars side by side has been the common theme among most of my riding for the past few days, with rolling hills only presenting themselves today, easy grades to get up with little to no effort and still at a great pace of 15km/h – this is easy riding. The heat doesn’t help however and while some days have had a nice breeze, with one day even offering a tail wind it still has been a challenge of constantly filling up with water, soaking my clothes, and taking rests. Timing my rides hasn’t worked out so well and I’ve put myself in the hottest point of the day repeatedly and continue to find the happy balance of when the right time to stop is. I’ve been riding till almost 7pm nightly only making a little over 100km regularly, paired with 2-3 hours of resting along the way from a days start at about 8am. If I was a morning person I’d be up at 5:30 getting on the road where it is nearly 30 degrees cooler for quite some time. I’ve noticed  huge drop in humidity as I travel westward, clothes becoming white with salt regularly and from what I understand it looks as if I’m only 100km or less away from an even drastic change where it will drop further. It seems at this stage I’ll welcome it, but I’m sure  I’ll write about the nastiness of it in the near future – just wait.

Other than the fire hall I’ve been staying at churches since I let New Orleans. They are plentiful, usually offer a power plug to charge my laptop (which started exhibiting issues as I experienced in April with it refusing to not shut down resulting in the laptop overheating in my pannier all day long and draining the battery. It’s related to Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Skype and Internet Explorer 9. I went ahead and rolled back all of the versions to ones released over a year ago and the problem went away – just goes to show that not everything new and updated is good for you!) and if I’m lucky, an open wireless network. I used to carry an external wireless card with me that had a very large antenna capable of outputting 1w which is about 10 times the regular power of a laptop card and had capabilities to read network packets differently however it has stopped working lately. The manufacturer only offers a 30 day warranty and I’m struggling with the idea of shelling out additional cash for a new one which may suffer the same fate. It was handy however being able to pick up a network 1km away, secured or not. I’ve been staying up quite late well into the night working on a project which is heavily taxing my laptops innards, it may be time if I want to continue with similar projects in the future to upgrade this nearly 1 year old laptop to something with a bigger screen, faster hard disk, more memory and CPU. This little unit (Acer TimelineX 1830T) isn’t bad whatsoever, and runs circles around most consumer laptops but could use a definite speed increase to avoid stuttering. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a subcompact laptop that performs like a laptop still however.

Donated Army Rations - Tasted not bad

The church experiences have been unique in their own way. One night, I was left alone after interrupting an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where the next night I met my first and hopefully only pastor who was downright racist. He said a few comments in relation to my next phase of the journey in Africa which tweaked a few buttons in me and I ceased to continue any conversation with him further – I always thought that the Christians were acceptant of all humans, whatever race or creed but obviously not. He said he’d probably get shot in Africa and I would agree with him if he keeps up with that attitude. Another experience was quite annoying where I was repeatedly badgered by someone dead set to try to convert me to the way of the Lord, even pulling out a Bible and repeatedly reciting verses from the book, stopping every 30 seconds mid sentence saying “Man this is some good stuff right here!”, and quickly discounting anything I had to say related to my own spiritual path (Which is nothing – I believe in Science, yo.) Good intentions from this man, but a bit much and after about 2 hours it became downright insulting – I guess I did walk right into it camping out in a Church however.

It looks as if I’m going to make it to Austin a day ahead of schedule, looking for a good rest for a few days and wanting to see if the city lives up to it’s motto of “Keep Austin Weird”. It’s going to be a great stop as I’m going to get a chance to meet Darryl from Lovingthebike.com and pick up from what I understand an awful lot of mail, as I’ve been handing out a mail drop address for the past month or more. I’m also going to be celebrating my 33rd birthday which I’ll make sure to have a great time while I’m there strictly because of that. After, I’ve not decided where to next – but certainly it involves heading Northwest. I’ll be in Texas for quite some time as its a huge state, and either cross into Oklahoma or New Mexico – all of this is to be determined. With recent brush fires plaguing New Mexico I may have to steer away from where I originally had planned to go.

So far, Texas hasn’t been so bad – a lot of people up give me the  gears about being in Texas but to tell the truth it is no more different than anywhere else. I’ve had mostly positive experiences with drivers, the odd puff of black smoke as a big truck passes me, and generous offerings of gallons of water by people at stores where I lay in a half conscious state. I’ve come to think that a lot of people who rag on things never have experienced different places before and are negative strictly for the sake of feeling better about their existence on earth. Diversity. On that note, I’m wrapping this up as the family of deer goes back to their hiding spot. They noticed me, and started making a noise that sounded like a trucker releasing their air brakes – it must have been a deer back in Pennsylvania when I was all worried in the woods.

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• Night of the living bugs