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Texas Two Times

Big Bend National Park & Hill Country
December 26, 2004 - January, 2, 2005

Trip Highlights

With adequate time to plan the route for this trip, I was actually done a few days before our departure date, which was a miracle since I’m such a procrastinator. When I got up on Christmas Day, the only thing I still needed to do was pack. I heard that a blanket of snow greeted residents of South Texas on Christmas morning, up to 13 inches of snow, breaking snowfall records. A bit worried, I re-checked the weather for some of the locations we would ride though. It was supposed to be warming up again by the end of the week, so we should be OK. Everything was coming together nicely.

But we already know none of our trips ever go as planned. Brian’s business gets really slow in the winter time, so to keep himself busy he works for a local towing company from mid December to the end of February each year. This particular Christmas morning he was called out on a tow and was driving back home when a Blazer pulled up to a stop sign at a side street on Brian’s right. At 7AM, they were the only two vehicles on the road. The snow was falling but the roads were not too bad. Brian took his foot off the gas pedal until he saw the other vehicle come to a complete stop, then started to accelerate. He took his eyes off the Blazer and the next thing he sees is the Blazer right in his path. The Blazer just pull out in front of him. Brian had very little time to react and could not stop his vehicle. The flat bed tow truck struck the Blazer T-bone style.

After the police showed up, they figured out the driver of the Blazer had been drinking and was an illegal alien. He had no driver’s license or insurance and the Blazer was not even his. He was taken to the hospital. Brian had hit his cheek on the steering wheel but was feeling fine, just a bit shaken up.

After a lot of paper work and questions from the police Brian went back to the shop and got another tow truck, he was still going to continue working and was on-call until 8AM tomorrow morning. At this point I didn’t know if going on a motorcycle tour was the best thing to do, but he assured me that he felt fine and we were pretty much ready to go, the trailer with our bikes was already packed and waiting for us at the towing company’s heated warehouse. We just needed to drop off Brian’s tow truck tomorrow morning and hook up the trailer to the truck and head towards Texas.

The more I though about it, the more I started to worry. My original plan had us leaving the truck and trailer in Kerrville, TX and we would ride from there to Big Bend National Park and back. What if we got there and Brian was too sore to ride, or it was too cold to ride. I decided that we should tow the bikes to Big Bend instead. In case we couldn’t ride, we could still take the truck up to the park and go hiking and the whole trip wouldn’t be for nothing. I had a few hours to redo the route to make that work. We would start in Big Bend, ride to Hill Country and come back. Since Big Bend was further from Chicagoland, we would loose half a day of riding on the first day. I didn’t have time to finalize the route, so I brought the laptop with on this trip.

Sunday, December 26
Departing Chicagoland

Brian was called to do a tow at around 7AM, so I already knew we would be leaving later than expected. With the changing of the route and still needing to pack last night, and entertain some family, I only got four hours of sleep. Brian ended up getting called out on tows a few times last night, so he didn’t have much sleep either. After dropping off the tow truck and hooking up the trailer, we were finally on our way at 10:30AM. I took the first turn driving, at least it wasn’t snowing any more and the roads were clear although it was only in the mid 20’s. The time saving advantage we had on this trip, we didn’t need to pull over and get any food. We brought plenty of food for the drive. Leftovers from our Christmas dinner were configured in to convenient sandwiches. I had plenty of fish sandwiches and Brian had ham sandwiches and some pumpkin pie.

At about 8PM in Joplin, MO Brian was finally rested enough to take his turn driving and I would finally get to take a nap in the back of the Trailblazer. He noticed that none of the trailer lights were working. We stopped at a Walmart and he started checking and replacing components for the electrical hookup. Two hours later and the lights still were not working. Neither of us wanted to spend the night here, we wanted to continue driving and get to Texas as soon as possible. Needing some advice, he called our friend Dave and with some phone assistance Brian was going to try and splice some wires together from the truck to power the trailer lights directly. With so many different colored wires, it was trial and error but after another two hours we had running lights and brake lights working. No signals, but those were not that important. We didn’t have any electrical tape with us and Walmart had just closed. The three gas stations in town didn’t halve any either so we finally got the next best thing – the all purpose duct tape. Now after midnight we were finally leaving Joplin. I climbed inside the sleeping bag so exhausted. I started to drift off in to La La land, the tires now singing in a high pitch hum along on the pavement. All the sudden the rhythm changed as we started slowing town and Brian took the next exit off the interstate. The trailer light’s were not working again. I climbed in to the driver’s seat again to press the brake pedal as directed when Brian needed me to test the connection and after another 20 minutes the problem was fixed and we were on our way again.

 

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