Day 30: Houston, Texas (County)

Breakfast was the kind you remember — we had everything on offer and then some — which was just as well, since the climbing started again the moment we left Eminence and burned through every calorie of it in short order. Joe flatted early, so we pulled in by a kayak rental place to fix it, the lot already busy with Saturday trade; there’s no shortage of rivers to float around here. While Joe worked the tyre I overheard a group about our age, freshly arrived by car, talking up the “crazy” road trip they had planned for the day — out to the next town and back, a wild thirty miles round trip they seemed genuinely nervous about.

Ozarks, roughly translated from the French Aux Arcs.

My view, all day everyday.

Collectors item shot of me riding.

We passed a fire tower and couldn’t resist the climb up for the view, which delivered exactly what it promised. The day’s mileage was set to be a little frustrating, though — out here it isn’t always about how far you feel like going, it’s about where the next place to sleep happens to be, and today that meant a choice between forty-five miles and something closer to ninety. On kinder terrain we might have pushed for the longer option, but we’d already decided to take it easy, so twenty-five miles in we stopped for lunch in Summersville.

Sitting in the park we watched an electronic temperature sign climb steadily higher, which promised an uncomfortable last twenty miles, but there was a reward waiting at the other end — the park in Houston, which sits, amusingly enough, in Texas County, had a pool. We found it packed with kids launching off the diving boards while their parents just stood in the shallow end soaking, and slipped in ourselves long enough to cool off before heading to the pavilion to pitch our tents. It made for an easy, relaxed sort of day — forty-five miles logged, the total past fourteen hundred — and very possibly the last one under fifty we’ll see for a good while yet.