El Camino Real Tour Update - October 29, 2005

Taylor to Apache Pass, Milam County
As you know from yesterday, I was scheduled to speak in San Antonio this morning at the 2nd Annual Symposium on El Camino Real de Los Tejas, my subject being bicycle tourism on Camino Real. About half of the participants are from Mexico. The conference has little radios with headsets and you listen to the translator in the booth if the language is not one you know.

I got up, explained what I was doing and talked about what they could do as historians in terms of providing educational opportunities in the field for travelers, i.e. cyclists. Went well and made some good contacts. The good news is that the Mexicans are interested in extending the designation of El Camino Real from the Rio Grande all the way down to Mexico City. That will be one long bicycle route.

Then back to pick up Clemmie in Austin, do some quick banking and then on to Taylor. We actually catch up with Mikail in Hare, a little crossroads on FM 1331 in far eastern Williamson County. There’s a little roadhouse there called Pauncho’s and Lefty’s but we don’t have time to stop. Soon Frank comes over the rise with our good friend Ken Fraley of Houston. Ken and I both served in Peace Corps in Korea, though not at the same time. Ken has been doing astronomy since he was a boy. He got me into it about 12 years ago and I got Ken into cycling several years ago. Ken met Frank and Mikail at Taylor at 1:00 p.m. and rode out of town together.

So I join them, Mikail and Clemmie take the vehicles to Apache Pass and we enter at the pass an hour later to the cheers of assembled folks starting to assemble at the pass.

Apache Pass is the ancient Native American crossing of the San Gabriel River, about 8 miles northwest of Rockdale. It was used by the Spanish for the crossing of one of the branches of El Camino Real. The other branch appears to head toward Rockdale and then east.

Kit and Linda Worley have had the property in their family for generations. Kit and Linda have now developed a venue there that includes a covered pavilion, a stage over a bend in the river across from a bowl shaped grass meadow, and a restaurant currently under construction. They had a Katrina relief rock concert two weeks ago and attracted 1500 people so word is starting to get around.

The event celebrating our passage was sponsored by Kit and Linda’s Apache Pass River Theater, the Rockdale Chamber of Commerce and the Milam County Historical Commission, Much thanks to Denice Doss, President of the Chamber for all of her effort to make this happen. Also to Lucille Estelle and Joy Graham of the historical commission and many others in Milam County who came and pitched in.

After an invocation by Chief Joseph Standing Bear of Bandera Texas, a member of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, we had a cookout of hamburgers, veggie burgers, hot dogs and sides., the program started with a few words by Denice, Lucille and me, and then programs by Randy Billingsley, a living historian portraying Texas in the 1830’s and dancing by the Texas Lumbee Tribe of the Cherokee Nation of Franklin, Texas, just up the road. They started with the “Friendship Dance” in which they invited everyone to participate and in which Clemmie and I did (while she gets her dancing fix through Jazzercise, Clemmie will still take most opportunities to dance) and in which I rediscovered what I already knew: I am better at pedaling a bicycle than I am at dancing.

We checked out the really cool Scamp Trailer (900 lbs.) that our friends Helen and Sue brought out and chatted with the 60 people that showed up from the Milam County area for the event.

Darkness fell, revealing a very nice night sky, complete with the Milky Way stretching through the Summer Triangle of the stars Vega, Deneb and Altair. Two of my very favorite astronomers, Kelley Knight of the Austin Astronomy Society and, of course, newly inducted Texas Heritage Cyclist Kennard Fraley set up their telescopes. In addition to the planets Venus in the west, Mars in the east and the Andromeda Galaxy overhead, we could see deep sky objects like the Ring Nebula, the M13 star cluster and the Double Cluster in Persius. The sky was very nice and dark – the “light domes” on the horizon from Rockdale and Thorndale in the south were very unobtrusive. Apache Pass will be a great place to lie on the grass in warm August to watch the annual Perseid Meteor Shower (peak on the 12th and 13th.)

Clemmie was pretty worn out from a 17-mile training run that morning. She has run Boston Marathon and the Athens Marathon in Greece (following the route of Phillippedes) and is now training to break the four-hour mark for the 26.2 miles. So we headed to the Rainbow Court Motel in Rockdale, which, according to a thesis by an A and M student in the 1980’s, is the oldest still-operating motel in Texas. It’s still in the same family and owners Dan and Joan Ratliff had everything ready for us. It’s a series of small wood frame rows of rooms and standalone houses in a beautifully landscaped court. Mikail’s wife Kate arrived coming from an evening commitment in Austin and we called it a day.

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