We woke up to a gorgeous day, with birds chirping under blue skies. The nearest coffee was seven miles down the road in Hunt, in the general store/John Wayne shrine. While waiting for breakfast to arrive, I looked through a real estate mag featuring ranches, and fantasized about having a spread of my own. Back on the road, I fantasized some more. Ranches announced themselves everywhere with showy gates and tree-lined drives. The whole area around Hunt and Kerrville appeared to be pretty well-heeled, perhaps a hunting playground for rich city folk. The terrain had become more civilized, too; our route followed the course of the bucolic Guadalupe river with nary a climb.
In Kerrville we had a decision to make. We were both exhausted from the previous day and Fred was complaining of a pain in his calf. Setting up camp in the riverside Sands motel was looking mighty tempting, even though it was still morning and we had only ridden twenty miles. The only thing keeping me from following this plan of action was a tailwind from God, one that could blow us all the way to Blanco, some sixty miles distant. After mulling over the most expensive espresso this side of Naples, we decided to push for Blanco. The weather was too pretty not to be riding, and the next twenty miles along the river would be a joy.
\--Or so we thought. What we hadn't factored into our decision was the high water from the previous day's storm. Just a few miles out of Kerrville, we ran into our first problem: the water had risen about a foot and a half above the level of the bridge, and was flowing pretty fast. After more deliberation, and a trial wade across by me, we decided to go for it. Only after we had transported our first load across did a big truck show up. The truck's owner was Texas friendly and Internet savvy, and offered us a ride across with our bikes.
Our trip was feeling like an adventure once again. We blew into an adorable little town called Comfort, and were surprised to find a café serving \"healthfood\" (Amy\'s Bluestem Restaurant); Toto, I have a feeling we're not in West Texas anymore. Our server and chef was called Craig, a seriously cute high school senior. He told us all about his plans for college and his opinions on various towns and regions of the Lone Star State and said he'd look us up on the Web. Fred and I rode away wondering if we could come back to Comfort to help Craig celebrate his eighteenth birthday...
From Comfort, hills began to reappear, and we had to take a detour around an unpassable river crossing. A funny old geezer forded us across in his beat-up pickup truck at a calmer, wider spot in the Guadalupe, adding ten miles or so to our planned itinerary. After chugging over some pretty mean hills, we stopped at the general store and bar in Sisterdale to reward ourselves with some Texas beer and some Texas wine (which was surprisingly drinkable). The place was right out of a piece of fiction, full of dudes wearing cowboy hats and spurs and speaking incomprehensible Texan.
The place's owner was an elderly tough-as-nails type woman who had grown up in Latvia. When I told her we'd be riding through there in August or September, she closed her eyes and said it would be pear season then. I suffered my first flat in a while in front of the gate of a very noisy ranch, just after a little altercation with the Butthead Driver of the Week (brown Oldsmobile Tornado, Texas handicapped plates, 5HPMS) who insisted we had no right riding our bikes in the road --our first such incident in Texas, surprisingly. These two events, coupled with a bit of backtracking due to a missed turn, got us into Blanco a bit after sundown.
We enjoyed watching the sun set from atop our saddles though, and the last twenty miles of the day were along a deserted country road that buckled and twisted its way through some beautiful hills and more than a few frigid streams. There wasn't much to Blanco, though it had a genuinely old-time Texan feel to it, with a bunch of crumbling buildings organized around a square with a hulking old courthouse in the middle of it. The only motel in town was a dump, and the menu at dinner looked a lot better than the actual food it described. Perplexingly, the sun-dried tomatoes in Fred's dish had been fried to a charcoal-like state.
We were entertained, however, by the arrival of a Catholic priest, followed by a man of elaphantine proportions in full Orthodox drag. Fred and I hypothesized that it was a themed night at the Sunset Restaurant and lounge, where patrons in religious costumes received a free entree; we never learned if this was indeed the case, though the place's owner informed us that our options for night life in Blanco on this particular Saturday evening were exactly nil. We headed back to the Bates-Motel-the-sequel for a thrilling night of t.v. and sleep.