Leaving Texas..

Hello,

Tuesday we rode from Breckenridge, TX to the stockyard section of Fort Worth. Today the Stockyard is more famous for its Coliseum than its cows. The Coliseum was built in 1908, and had the first indoor rodeo in 1923. Today they still have championship rodeo every Friday and Saturday nights The actual stockyards are a thing of the past. Our trip was also to try the Cattlemens' Restaurant, right next to the coliseum, famous for its steaks... We had really high expectations, because the Cattlemens' Cafe at the Stockyards of Oklahoma City was awesome, with blue collar atmosphere, great food, and blue collar prices. Well, the short version of our critique is don't go to the Cattlemens' Restaurant in Fort Worth. They are living on their reputation and taking money from tourists.

We decided to try to go to Mesquite, another rodeo town just east of Dallas. To get around Dallas we had to take the beltway... What a scary experience... We got to Mesquite, but my little Zumo kept telling me to get on the interstate for another 4 miles. I kept telling it "NO!!" I finally just aimed the motorcycle east and we rode for an hour. There's a lot more population here, so the concept of the wide open spaces is somewhat abbreviated.. We were heading toward Louisiana, and we wanted to head toward Arkansas, so we took some roads that headed northeast and ended up in Sulpher Springs, TX... The land here is GREEN.. the roads have curves... the temperature is only 100... even with the higher humidity... Ahhh...

A major industry in Sulpher Springs is a huge OceanSpray cranberry processing plant. Say it isn't so!! Where is the ocean????
So much for the hearty New Englanders growing cranberries out on Cape Cod and battling the winter weather ... The cranberries come from Texas... We bought some fruit.. peaches, strawberries, cherries etc. for supper in the motel room. It was probably the healthiest meal of the trip.

We do not stop at hotels that don't have a swimming pool or hot tub... That pool is worth the extra ten bucks...... We stopped at one hotel in Colorado and the last rule on the pool rule sign was "No Skinny Dippin' ".... I thought, "Good Grief, they have to write that??" then I thought, "Wait a minute, when I saw that pool as I was getting off the motorcycle, I had the urge to take off my gear and jump in." I guess somebody else was less inhibited....

This morning we got on to Texas route 11 after riding down a one lane county road 1328.. Then we took Texas route 8 and finished our meander east. Except for our trip around Dallas we rode all the way across Texas, all the way from El Paso, without getting on an Interstate. We did hop on Intersate 30 to get into Arkansas, mostly to get the free map at the visitor's center... We finally came to rest in Hot Springs, Arkansas. On the advice of the clerk at the hotel we went to a restaurant called "Jason's Burgers and More" This is a really good local place, and they apparantly have the best burgers in Arkansas. Jeannine wondered if it ever passed any zoning laws. The floor was a bit bouncy, the roof was tin, ceiling was low, the electric sockets were questionable, and the smoking section was the front porch. Anyway, Jeannine had fresh walleye, and I had fried catfish-- not those farm raised frozen fillets, but four catfish, bones and all. Yummm..
What's walleye?? They have fishing tournaments down here to catch walleye (hint: bass)..


More on New Mexico: Our final concert went Great.. We made the front page of the "Sun" section of the Las Cruces paper, and we were the warm-up band for "The Big Band of the Rio Grande".. Our concert was limited to less than 45 minutes, so it was zip between songs... We were PAID, well sort of. We got free admission to the Big Band concert - a TEN DOLLAR value!! The auditorium was full .. Nice..

Now its off to the wilds of Arkansas... We'll be going up route 7, one of the most scenic and winding routes in the Arkansas ozarks....

Harris and Jeannine