The American Prairies consist of owned land. Right along the road's ditch, there is a wire fence, and every few kilometers, an entrance to some megaranch, owned by a family for generations. Signs of life are minimal outside the occasional car that passes by. You should, at some point, look at a map of the counties of Texas to see just how repetitive it all is.
The towns are just arbitrary checkpoints, and they are all the same. The local economy is farming, half of the buildings are abandoned, and the only place to get food in town is either a small Mexican restaurant, or a burger joint. I use the word "Mexican" loosely, as most of these places also serve hamburgers, and other diner food. The people are nice, but that's always the case in small, well-off, homogeneous populations. There's really not much else. No one wants anything from me, and the only thing I want from them is water.
The wind continued today. A hot, dry, dusty wind coming from the south, mixed with the ever-so-slight perpetual incline. The birds chirp, cheep, and peep, in spring songs, and fly away from me, only to be carried by the strong winds, exposing their coloured underbelly feathers. The sun shines down strong, and I've run out of sunscreen, so I get a bit burnt. Later in the day, a different, cool wind came from the north-west. I coasted along it for a while, remembering how nice a tail-wind can be.
Even the roadkill is missing from the side of the road. Everything here is artificial. The straight road, the combed fields, the fences. All made square. I see a sign, giving another 50km until the next town, and the only thing going through my head is "well, here's another 3 hours to waste." My breaks don't come from places to lean the bike (I can't remember the last time I found something on the side of the road to lean my bike against), or from picnic areas (the last of which I saw right after leaving Wichita Falls), or from anything interesting along the way. My breaks come from the clock - every so and so kilometers, or so and so minutes of riding, I take a short break to eat a Nature Valley bar, or refill my water bottle from the reserve, or sit on my phone to answer e-mails.
On my breaks, I can't leave the bike. There's nowhere to put it, nowhere to sit. I leave it balancing between my legs, and every time a cattle transporter comes, always full going east, always empty going west, I lean over the bike and anchor my body down so that I don't get blown off balance by the winds. There's nowhere I want to linger. No sight, ambience, or mood I would like to enjoy further. I know that water is far away, and that if I don't want to dip into my emergency water, I better get moving.
It's stretches like these that make me appreciate how fast cars are, and the amazing difference between 100km by car, and 100km by bike. On the one hand, in the upcoming weeks, this will only get worse, as I enter the desert. On the other hand, interstate highway corridors are probably much more exciting. On the third hand, a random sampling of Google Streetview snippets along the route says otherwise.
I've written in the past about the randomness of mood, and today, possibly due to the increasingly-apparent sunburns, boredom, or late start, I seem to be in a pretty sour mood.
At least I'm finally out of Texas, and into three weeks of desert I go...
Today I biked 90km over the course of about five hours. I did some biking around Clovis looking for new inner tubes, as my current tubes have leaks in them, and I'd like to rebuild my collection of spares.