Well doesn’t time fly. Only one month left on my US visa and still so long to go. After a night of catching up on my blog and then taking some fun long exposure photos I was back on track and ready to get a move on. Stupidly forgetting to set my alarm meant that I was up very late and as I sat eating my breakfast pancakes was collared by the park ranger who drove up in his big white truck. I saw the night before that the camping was going to be $5 entrance plus $25 to camp. Kinda crazy prices I thought. I considered telling him I had come in early but decided quickly that honesty was the best policy and promised to come check in (and then leave) when my breakfast was done. I was feeling more hard done by when I took a shower in a block filled with dead and dying bugs and felt the ‘no dishwashing’ sign was an affront to my personal diginity as I washed my dishes in the toilet block anyway. Where was I supposed to wash my dishes? Isn’t this a camp site?

I went off to see the place with the tracks again and found myself on the cliff over the river I was walking along the previous night. It showed some tracks in the water on the photographs but after climbing down the rather perilous bank I saw nothing after a good look. Some marks in the river bed were contenders but the tracks can freeze over and they slowly erode, nothing to see here, move along. I hauled myself back up the dirt slope using the abundant roots and thinking how much my nephews would love to come Dinosaur hunting with me down here one day. I swung by the main site but I could see nothing down the bank. Most of the best tracks now lived in the New York Natural History Museum I learned and wondered if they were on display when Renae was corralling me through so she could get packed up in time. Who knows. I had a thought in the back of my mind as I got in the car to leave, I would be able to make a choice when I got to the gate and I didn’t know what it would be. $30 or doing a runner? I’d spent loads in all these state parks and wasn’t really using the water and electricity. I wasn’t even staying a full 24 hours like most RV’rs, usually turning up after dark and leaving in the morning. $30 was horrendously expensive. I drove up to the office by the park entrance…. I saw one parked car, no Ranger 4×4 ….and… kept going…. I got about 100 meters and saw a flash of white in my rear view mirror. The Ranger pulled out into pursuit….

He was coming up behind and I was now rapidly thinking of excuses, I forgot, I thought the entrance was further up, I’m a moron. I got to the T-junction, it was a long curve and there was no other traffic so I quickly went left without stopping towards the creation proof museum. I looked back, the Ranger reached the junction and swung back into the park. There was no one else in the park so he knew I was doing a runner. It seemed I had gotten away with it, but I was in a small area and quite a few miles from the main road up ahead. I then realized how stupid this was. He had my number plate, it would be so easy to call the cops and they would be waiting for me on the main road. I turned around and driving past the park once more I took the right turn on the T junction away from the main road. I could have gone back and paid but… I don’t know. Even now gripped in the fear of getting arrested I didn’t want to. I drove the extra miles with a heavy heart. Not so much that I had drove off without paying but as the Park receeded into the distance I now thought I might have screwed myself for future camping and they could still arrest me. All they had to do was put my licence plate in the computer and they would see I had absconded before. Go Directly to Jail. Not good….

I got back on the main road south and this guilt was eating me up like my V-8 ate the miles. I felt rather low, but it was mostly of my own making. I drove, the sun shone, I pumped gas and wondered for the thousandth time what the hell I was doing. People build model boats that will never sail and few people will see, run across continents and no one cares, write novels that will never get published. I guess they all go through the same feelings, why bother? Still I had come so far and would have to go a while further, only R and half of O to go before I officially reached the halfway point and I had redrawn the ‘travel’ to make it a lot smaller and hence quicker and cheaper. I hoped Daniella would approve when I met her up in Amarillo. I found a station that started talking about ‘The Golden Compass’ and listened eagerly. This was a film I was looking forward to watching after thoroughly enjoying the trilogy previously. The female reviewer set the background and explained some of the more unusual aspects of the film (peoples souls taking the form of animal companions who can talk and change shape and other weird ideas) and then described lots of what happened in the film and what she thought. To my delight I quickly realized I was listening to a Christian Stations review and since there has been some controversy over the trilogies anti-Christian stand wondered what they would make of it all.

I drive along both incredulous at their naivety and laughing at their moral superiority.
‘Lyra at one point tries to kill her mother’ said the reviewer’
‘Oh my god!’ Reacted the host with horror and I’m shouting at the radio how her Mother *first* tries to kill her daughter and is attacked by the very thing she used while trying to steal from her daughter.
The phrase that stood out for me was that they thought that if a Christian child saw the movie it might ‘open a door’… What the hell is that? Open a door? To what? Rationally thinking about your life? Open a door to realizing that a bunch of fools who can’t just watch a fantasy movie written by an Athiest and not be able to enjoy it for what it is… fiction… might be so paranoid and deluded that perhaps they are all wrong. Children should be able to justify with reason, why they are Christians and the whole idea of a young person being raised in one religion as opposed to another is just crazy. All the religious people can’t be worshipping the right god. At the end of the interview the host thanked the reviewer for what seemed to be quite an ordeal. I just laughed and became determined to see it as soon as possible.

I had a loop to do in Texas and had only vaguely planned it. I was completely off by going to Dinosaur valley but it made a lovely curve all the way down, through San Antonio, up by Houston and back over to Dallas. Problem was the route was massive. I was bored too and needed to hurry to get over to meet Daniella. Really what is the point of driving huge distances on a road trip when all you’re doing is just driving, and having to do so much of it at night you won’t be seeing the place anyway. So it happened that somewhere on the highway south I programmed in Austin in stead of San Antonio just to see what it looked like and I left it in. I started my trip back east a bit sooner and cut several hundred miles from the route thinking I could scoot through Austin and get to Dallas so much sooner. They even had Panera bread place there too! I plugged in the location and headed over to write some e-mail and maybe even see if I could find a host at short notice.

I was only there 10 minutes and half way through my first (usually of many) coffees when I learned there was a CS gathering in Austin that night. Cool. Into the GPS went the address and into my minivan went I, maybe I wouldn’t be sleeping in Walmart tonight. It was about 6 miles away and I was soon there. They had the great idea of having a gathering above the Whole Foods shop which meant you could go down and buy beer, even drink it in the store and then go back up to the patio where they had chairs and tables with your booze and snacks and have a cheap night out. Its an well kept secret in Austin and a great place to hang out. They even had a kids play area for when you get really drunk :p That wasn’t going to happen tonight though unfourtunatly and I walked up and headed for the largest group of people I could see… ‘Um, are you couch surfers’ I asked and despite their attempts to deny it I had found about 12 locals in the midst of getting drunk.

Once the introductions were out of the way I sat down next to the guy who organized it, Josh, and it took less than a minute for him to offer me a place to stay. Maybe I would have to stay a few days. Everyone was very nice and we sat eating chips and drinking Balitka beer for a couple of hours. Josh had just come back from Biking in Central America so seemed like the perfect guy to hang out with in Austin, fun and interesting. I got a call from Daniella who was in Salt Lake City and trying to figure out how to get to me. I suggested Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle as she said she would start looking at buses up to there. I guessed I would be in Dallas again in a few days and after another hour or so she called back to say the greyhound bus idea was a bad one and it would be cheaper to fly to Dallas on Sunday which sounded like a much better plan to me as I could then have a couple of days relaxing in Austin before heading around to pick her up on Sunday. Perfect.

People started leaving but half a dozen of us fancied another few beers so we saddled up into our respective vehicles and went over to a bar called Rudamaya near where Josh lived. It was not the salsa we expected but New Orleans Jazz with a $10 cover. Didn’t seem like the best idea so we just went to Josh’s to drink beer and chat until about 2am. His roommate was away too so although the sofa looked good I got a bed for the night and spent a cofy night relaxing in the knowledge I wasn’t going to have to drive like a mad man to Amarillo over a couple of days… Phew!



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