Breckinridge, Texas

 

Greg sent me off with a Dallas Video Fest neckerchief, not because I’d complained  about not having found a neckerchief along the road yet, but because he had a bunch of them and he noticed I had a neckerchief dangling out of the rear pocket of my pants.  Fifteen hundred miles into a tour in the US without a neckerchief is unheard of.  I have six license plates already, three since I crossed into Texas. I’m approaching my carrying capacity, at which point this trip will have to come to an end.

Fifteen miles down the road from Greg’s place, halfway to Fort Worth, what do I find but a nicely faded red neckerchief, and a traditional cotton one.  It could be the first of many now.  It took quite a bit of rinsing to squeeze out all the dirt saturating it.  It must have been astray for quite some time, mournfully abandoned along the road waiting to be rescued.  

Texas has a primary next week.  Bunches of signs for candidates are clustered all over. 

And with all things Texas, they were oversized, or Texas-sized, as is the popular term here.  The term appears on signs advertising all manner of items, from burgers to hotel rooms.

Through Fort Worth, mixed in with the campaign signs, were signs for the Cow Town Marathon next week.  There was no indication of it being Texas something-or-other.  

The large star on the state flag is a popular decorative item on homes and fences and elsewhere, emphasizing this is the Lone Star state.  It goes back to the flag that flew over Texas after it won its war to gain independence from Mexico in 1836 before becoming a state in 1848. 

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State pride is also reflected in the abundance of historical markers.  Road signs warn of one coming up in a mile.  Small towns will have a handful.  They are numbered and there are thousands.  

There was little separating the towns for over seventy miles west of Dallas.  I ended up camping in an overgrown vacant lot surrounded by trees within the city limits of Weatherford, a college town of a sort.  It was a large enough town to have an Aldi’s, which have been few and far between.  I was leery about making a mile detour to check out its dumpster late in the day, especially since the two Aldi’s I had checked in Dallas had huge industrial trash compactors as their dumpsters, but I couldn’t deny my curiosity of what I might find and I was amply rewarded.  

It being a Sunday with no garbage pickup the dumpster was packed.  When I was done with it my panniers were bulging with bananas, avocados, two jars of cheese spread, a loaf of bread, two boxes of vanilla wafers, a sealed pack of chicken strips with a pack of Alfredo sauce, three boxes of chocolate cookies, and a bag of grapes.  And the capper was two pecan pies which I lashed on top of my tent and sleeping bag.  The pies were a great score, but I was most excited by a box of a dozen chocolate Swiss rolls, as it brought back fond memories of scoring ten boxes of them with Chris two summers ago in Ohio when I introduced him to the bounty of the dumpster.  

It may have been a day without a Carnegie, but it was still a great day.  And the day ahead would also be without a Carnegie, as it was two hundred miles from Irving to the next in Stamford.  But the cycling was great and that’s what it’s all about.  I was joined on route 180 by an occasional motorcyclist, the first I’d encountered, endorsing the road as a scenic route, slightly hilly and windy through scraggly brush.  The cattle had plenty of vegetation to disappear amongst. A generous shoulder gave added pleasure to the riding, though a ghost bike dangling from a tree was a reminder to remain vigilant. 

It may be a week since the Super Bowl, but some of the sports podcasts I listen to are still discussing it and its half-time show and all the commercials.  The commercials certainly make an impact. People enthusiastically recall the Payton Manning commercial paying homage to the Big Lebowski and another Sopranos-themed.  No one mentions though the bold Expedia commercial concluding with the wisest words of the whole Super Bowl extravaganza—“When you’re old you’re not going to regret the things you didn’t buy, but the places you didn’t go.”  

That could have been considered a public service commercial worthy of being run after every touchdown and at the end of every quarter and twice at the end of the game.  On the other hand all the other advertisers, especially those selling cars, could have deemed it un-American and threatened to pull their commercials if it had been run.  It should have been the most talked about commercial, but it was totally ignored.