Day 87-Crunchy On The Outside, Chewy On The Inside
Trip Start
May 19, 2008
1
89
161
Trip End
Nov 08, 2008
Atlanta,
Texas,
United States
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
We headed out of town east on Highway 82 and soon came across Wal-Mart so stopped for supplies. We were so hungry we even had our lunch sat in the bus in the car park. Back on the road we travelled through many small towns, although the Americans do insist on calling them cities. Surely a city has a population of thousands, not 132! And no matter how large or how miniscule these towns are, in this area they all have one thing in common - churches. Hundreds of them. In one town, we swear we saw more churches than houses.
We stopped at Dairy Queen in one of the towns for our afternoon cool-off
Pat Mayse Lake
. Mel overheard some woman talking about an article in the newspaper regarding something happening at the "Dallas ranch". So wondering if we were close to said ranch we bought a paper to find out. It turned out that the ranch actually does exist and isn't just a studio prop. It's at a place called Parker on the eastern outskirts of Dallas and in November they will be throwing a party there to mark the 30th anniversary of the show's debut. We reached our camp site, Jackson Creek on the Wright Patman Lake, but we didn't feel comfortable there for several reasons. Firstly, we were the only ones there and there was no ranger station or similar. Secondly, the only road into the camp site became the boat ramp and ran straight into the lake. And lastly, but most worryingly especially given the lack of escape routes, the road that took us in went through some woods and past a house where a red-necked individual with a scary looking pit-bull type dog sat watching us go past as if working out how many chops he could get off the pair of us.
So off we went to find another site which was close by but just took us a bit further off our route than we had hoped to go. Better that, than a "Hills Have Eyes" type adventure though! As we left the scary site we spotted our first live Armadillo
Mmmmm!
. We've seen quite a few the last couple of days but they've all been squashed at the side of the road. We soon arrived at Atlanta State Park and got ourselves settled into a pitch. The showers here aren't brilliant but after last night they don't seem all that bad. At least there are no insect infestations. What is this aversion that people in this area seem to have towards cleaning?
Mel's pleased to announce that the real Neil is back - he had an accident trimming his beard and so had to take the whole lot off. He had only grown it to look scary while we are doing this trip, but after seeing that really scary looking bloke in those woods today, probably thought it wouldn't have worked anyhow!
Miles travelled: 135
Total miles travelled: 8364
Days on road: 67
States visited: 13
National Parks visited: 11
