We left Austin around 6:00pm and headed south towards the Rio Grande. It was nice to ride in the cooler evening air, but soon we were riding in the dark solitude of desert roads. Here we encountered a new phenomenon: bugs. Now I’m sure we had met thousands of little insects in head on collisions over the past few weeks, but now it felt like millions. Keeping with Texan style, they were huge and exploded their yellow guts everywhere. There were a few times it felt like a baseball had collided with my shin or knee at 80mph.
At around 12:30am we arrived at the Amistad visitor’s center which was long closed. We grabbed a map from the rack near the front door and huddled around the glow of my headlight contemplating our landing for the night. Lake Amistad is a reservoir that had been formed by a dam built on the Rio Grande, and it is half in Mexico and half in the United States. We selected what we felt would be a suitable spot and set out to make camp.
I don’t know if we made a wrong turn or what, but after 15 minutes of driving in the shroud of darkness passed a little green sign that simple read: “Mexico.” I slowed down a bit, looked at Alex, shrugged my shoulders, he nodded his head and we continued cautiously down the road. Only a few minutes passed before we could see a structure ahead illuminated only by our headlights. We pulled up to a large steel gate with a big read “STOP” sign affixed to the center. To the right and to the left were tall metal fences stretching in both directions and fading into the darkness.
Were we at the Mexican border? We got out the map and checked again. It didn’t seem right, but one thing seemed certain, we were not supposed to travel any further on the road we were on. My friend Christian once told me that you can fix anything if you are willing to buy the part twice. Alex believes that driving incorporates the same theory. You can get anywhere if you are willing to do a few U-turns along the way. We did a one-eighty and returned to the road we were certain of and chose a new camping location further west.
Our destination led us down another side road where we encountered many deer along the way (30+) as well as an armadillo. While this time the road didn’t lead us to a huge metal gate and have us wishing our Spanish skills were major, it did dead end- this time in water. No problem, we found a nice, sandy spot on the shore to set up the tent and get some rest. This was the second time on the trip when we were lulled to sleep by lapping waves (Lake Ontario).
When we finally shut down the bikes for the night the trip odometer read 4002 miles.
In the morning we were able to discover what was surrounding us in the night. The water was clear and looked to be several feet high- explaining the road that suddenly ended in the lake.
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