Day 91, October 31st 2007 (Rusk,TX to Jasper,TX)

The day seemed to be on repeat around Texas.  I started the morning heading south along the eastern edge of Texas and I could have sworn that this was now the worst road that I had been on.  With the traffic being busy and having horrible roads to ride on, the day seemed to continue to drag on forever.  I would look around to my right and to my left and all I could see for the first 60 miles were trees.  They lined the road on both sides and it made it difficult to see much of anything besides the road and cars around you.  I was focused in on the cars most of the day anyways because of the rude drivers in the area.  If I wasn't on a busy road out of a city then I was in a city on a busy road.   I was so happy to have made it off of the highway I was on after the first 60 miles and then I was able to get onto a highway going east.  It was a much smaller highway with a lot less traffic.  The trees opened up to some great views every now and again, and it was going directly through a forest.  It was a much more beautiful and relaxing ride to get myself to where I was going.  I had the luxury to ride on the road for about 30 miles before I started to turn off of the road and head towards the place that I was going.  I had contacted Nick from the warm shower's list and he had told me that he wasn't going to be able to host me, but that he had found someone who was going to be in town and would be able to take care of me.  He gave me the number of a man named Michael Moore.  I was told that Michael was a great old man with a long white beard and he had a great house on a lake.  As I turned each corner down the very deserted road to get to where I was headed, the surroundings were incredible.  It was such a beautiful area to have a place and away from everything else in the area.  I found Michael's place without a problem and when I first showed up he was unloading a ton of bamboo sticks from a truck and placing them in his yard.  It seemed as though he had a good amount of land and I could see the little lake behind his house.  I was able to get to know him for a good amount of time and he seemed like a man with many stories.  He had lived on the road in his RV for 12 years and had been able o get to know handfuls of people.  He would park his RV at many places and stay there for months and then leave and go somewhere else.  It seemed incredible to be on the road for that length of time, but he had enjoyed every moment of it.  Now, living in Louisiana, he was still a man with a simple life.  He didn't work and he lived off of the land.  He grew a lot of different vegetables and had a system in the lake set up to where he was able to eat the fish that he caught.  He had trout lines set up in the lake and each day he would put minnows on the hooks of the line and then he would go back out at night and check to see what he had caught for dinner.  Well, as we were talking he told me that it was time to check the lines.  We took his little canoe-like boat out on the lake and followed a line that stretched out for about 50 feet.  There was nothing on the line, but we did put a few minnows on a few hooks because something had taken them off.  I was thinking that his seemed like a place where you could probably run into some gators, and that is about when Michael started to tell me about the gators.  He told me that he had been here for a little while and when he first moved here he had killed an 11 foot alligator in the lake.  Then he said about a month later that his neighbor had killed a 14 foot alligator.  I couldn't believe it, but now I didn't feel as worried about there being any more alligators in the area.  As we finished the line I thought that we were going to head back to the dock, but we started to go more towards the center of the lake.  I wasn't sure what we were doing, but then I started to see another line.  This one was about twice as long and yet there was still nothing on the line.  As we came back to the dock it was still gorgeous outside.  The weather was just great right now and it was Halloween.  I wasn't quite used to this, but I wasn't complaining.  When we reached the shore we went inside and made some BBQ Venison for supper.  It was a great meal and was followed by an incredible evening with some of Michael's neighbors.  His neighbors were from across the lake and they came over to play some pool.  We played I don't even know how many games of pool, and it was a very relaxing way to finish the evening.  

Daily mileage: 92.2 miles
Average speed: 13.0 mph
Total mileage: 5,616.0 miles