El Camino Real Tour Update - November 2, 2005

Crockett to Nacogdoches
It was still dark and plenty brisk (37 degrees) and we could see the Dog Star Sirius high in the clear western sky when we walked over to the restaurant for a great breakfast at the Crockett Inn. You know a restaurant is good when there is a circular table with about ten local men sitting around over coffee chatting like they do it real often – once a week or maybe every day.

Later speaking with motel owner Mr. Albert Kwok, I found that Mr. Kwok’s daughter rides for the Baytown Exxon-Mobil cycling team each year in the MS150 two-day bike ride from Houston to Austin.

We have shoulders for a few miles as we leave Crockett eastbound on Texas Highway 21 but they soon drop away. This is the part where I have been a concerned as this area has fairly high rural population density. There is another more direct highway from Crockett to Nacogdoches that I figure most traffic will use. Frank and I do fine as traffic is constant but fairly light.

We arrive at Mission Tejas State Park, now solidly in the pines and more specifically in the middle of the Davy Crockett National Forest. This is the site of Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, established in 1690 as the first Spanish mission in Texas. Of course it was “Tejas” at that time and the mission was in direct response to the French establishment of Fort Saint Louis on Lavaca Bay by LaSalle, who had accidentally overshot his original intended site on the Mississippi River by hundreds of miles. By the way, there is a great museum on the campus of Victoria College in Victoria, Texas on the LaSalle settlement. I won’t go into detail except to say that LaSalle didn’t win any Boss of the Year awards from his French settlers.
We visit and film the log mission replica at the park and are shooting footage of the Mission Tejas State Park sign in front on the highway when this van pulls in, a woman gets out and says “Are you by any chance Mark Stine?”

Well, who among you out there, having subconscious flashbacks to child, teenager, or even early adulthood, wouldn’t automatically pause (freeze?) for a second when asked that. (If you’re flashing to middle age, you are definitely having problems.)

But I meekly answered “yes” and it was Gina Dovovan, who had testified before a Texas Senate legislative subcommittee last spring on behalf of the Texas Bicycle Coalition for the Texas Bicycle Tourism Trails legislation (Senate Bill 602 – you can click on it on our webpage to read the language – it’s short and sweet.)

Gina is president of the Texas Committee on Natural Resources out of Lufkin and is specifically working on the Neches River Protection Initiative. One of the main parts of this effort is establishment of a tourism route signed for bicycles on a series of north-south back roads (El Camino Real is east-west) through the national forest parallel to the Neches River connecting Palestine (pronounced Pal-e-Steen for you non-Texans) with Lufkin. Gina was giving friends Barbara and Betty a tour of the route. It’s exactly the types of local initiatives we are supporting around El Camino Real as a cross-state bike route as together the series of roads provide the loops and scenic quiet routes for great day or two-day rides for locals or visitors.

I have talked with Gina many, many times by phone and email. I guess we got within 30 feet of each other at the hearing but the room was so packed for the full agenda and she left immediately for another meeting that we had never actually met. Gina’s route jogs on Highway 21 for just a couple miles before heading south again so our chance meeting was oh-so-judicious perfect timing. She saw the magnetic signs on Mikail’s car and us standing there in our outfits (if you have an outfit, you can be a Heritage Cyclist, too) and she figured that’s got to be Mark. Great finally meeting you, Gina!

We then headed a few miles down the road to the Neches River crossing and stopped at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. This site consists of three small mounds by the road build in the 500-1100 AD period by prehistoric mound builders. Excavation has confirmed them as burial mounds. They are very simple. Not like the serpentine ones in South Carolina or even the horseshoe-shaped ones near my hometown of Anderson, Indiana, but mounds just the same. They were a landmark on El Camino Real and mentioned in all of the journals.

So, for the next installment in our adventure, Mikail pulls into the small town of Alto, where Gina had recommended the Country Kettle. He goes into the local hardware store for some item and finds himself talking to the Mayor, Her Honor Betty White, who is very interested in our trip. After we eat at the Country Kettle, a little place at the stop light with a great buffet and (Hallelujah!) Wi-Fi, I go back and chat with Betty. She then connects me by phone with her friend Samantha Swindler of the Jacksonville Progress. Samantha then interviews me on-phone where I also refer her to our website and travel updates, we step outside to take a picture of us – bikes, van and all – in front of Betty’s store, Mikail emails the picture to Samantha and, voila, another nice publicity piece for the trip. Thanks, Betty and Samantha!

Mikail goes on in the van to get our room in Nacogdoches and Frank and I continue across the Angelina River and through Douglass as we trudge on. No shoulders and its getting a bit rough. Traffic starts its afternoon increase and there seem to be lots of trucks after we pass Alto. We are starting to see long trucks with logs piled high up and long out the back. Some traffic slows and waits if there are on-coming vehicles but some just goes by us cutting pretty close. Definitely need shoulders on ALL of Highway 21 if it is to be signed as a bicycle route.

I don’t gauge it as extremely dangerous – how dangerous is it for two oncoming cars to pass each other 70 mph each only a few feet from each other? It’s done billions of times each day – with only a tiny fraction of percent of failures. But it’s not fun, it’s not where I would choose a recreational route given the present infrastructure, and I wouldn’t want to do it often.
Finally, about eight miles from Nacogdoches, Highway 21 finally grants us a smooth seal coat surface and nice wide shoulders. Mikail had left a phone message telling us about a monster set of hills with a small plateau in the middle seven miles out of town that we might have to “walk our bikes up.”

“Sounds to me like he’s making a challenge” says Frank. Shortly after as we hit the shoulders we look up and see the hills. It will turn out to be a 1.5 mile climb of perhaps 15%. We may be 50+ but our legs know what to do and we work our way up. In a strange way, that perhaps only cyclists can understand, it actually felt good! But we did refrain from going back down and climbing it a second time.

Now we are on the shoulders of the smoothest seal coat to date on our trip, cruising up and down a more modest series of hills when three young roadies (road cyclists – with Lance-type racing bikes for you non-cyclists) come flying the opposite direction. I wave and yell hello and they respond “Are you the guy giving the talk?” I forget to mention that Stephen F. Austin State University geography professor Bill Forbes has arranged for me to address his Geography Club meeting this evening at 5:00 p.m. and Bill obviously kept his promise of spreading the word to the cycling club on campus.

We arrive at the Highway 21-US 59 interchange a mile west of downtown Nacogdoches that is blocked off because of an overturned box container truck that was turning right. It is marked for some sort of hazardous materials (I can’t remember most the placard number from my emergency response days anymore.) Traffic is being sent a block before the intersection on an apparent several mile detour but when we tell the officer we are going downtown, he says we can keep to the far left of our lanes (oncoming traffic lanes are still open.) We chat and tell him our itinerary and he tells us to have a great time in Nacogdoches.

Into the very nice Hotel Fredonia, a quick shower, then I get into a clean set of bicycle regalia and pedal to my talk at the University. I’ve brought my bike, my faithful trailer BOB, my panniers, the whole bit for show and tell. I meet Bill Forbes, and young new professor at SFASU whose wife is doing her post-doc at the University of Texas Marine Studies Institute in Corpus Christi, her specialty being the Nueces River on its entry into Nueces Bay. (Remember the Nueces in Crystal City at Barbara and Ken Rice’s ranch?)

I asked Bill how much time I had to talk and he said an hour. An hour!? That means I don’t have to prioritize. I can ramble. Go into stream-of-consciousness. I might even have time for a couple songs!

In short, they were a great audience and loads of fun. Geography majors and cyclists. Lots of back and forth.

We talked about geographical history, which is really my area of interest in history – where on the land did the roads and trails actually traverse and all that. We talked about all kinds of cycling, cycling advocacy, and even community quality-of-life issues raised by Casey Page, a young man in the audience who is finishing his degree soon and already looking at graduate programs.

Jason Long, one of the three cyclists I saw on the road, was there. Jason said the other two cyclists wanted to attend but in the end they went out “too far” and hadn’t returned back to town yet. Is this a great sport or what! Jason is very interested in the concept of taking junior high and high school students out on summer bike tours down historic routes – I look forward to keeping with contact with him about a pilot program in that area.

Mikail needed to do web work and take care of other logistics so they did not join me at the talk. Bill came back with me to the hotel, both of us riding our bikes the less-than-a-mile from the University down the streets of the very nice town of Nacogdoches.

We joined Frank and Mikail for dinner at the hotel restaurant . Let me just say that Mikail and Frank have been great traveling companions. It takes extra effort on everyone’s part to make a long journey like this to work and we manage to work out the inevitable little bumps that come along. And they have both been extremely generous in their contribution in time, talent, resources, and spirit. I couldn’t do this without them and I am deeply in debt to them both.

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