April 16, Day 25 cycling Camp Wood to Del Rio, TX

79.4 miles & 1494’ elevation gain and actually lost more elevation than we gained today since we are now at the Rio Grande (!) and out of the Texas Hill Country as of this morning. We cycled through 4 of 9 regions of the Texas Hill Country, each region defined by its rivers. Now we are into a much drier SW Texas.

We were on three roads today with a lot of chipseal, still! Bones usually don’t get a workout cycling, but I think my bones are much stronger and denser after cycling on Texas roads! We did find a few smooth spots today, and thankfully the last 5 miles into Del Rio were nice….. as we watched so many jets overhead from Laughlin Air Force Base. And most thankfully, we enjoyed dry cloud cover all day and a super helpful SE tailwind. The first 18.5 miles were into the wind since we traveled due south out of Camp Wood, but it was first thing in the morning, so the wind wasn’t too bad yet. Then we turned west all day.

For most of Texas, we’ve seen very high 8’ fences for keeping in animals for private hunting. Only 5% of Texas is public lands. We’ve seen miles and miles and miles of high fences. A big part of the Texas economy is private game hunts for exotic animals like the ones we saw today – emu, scimitar oryx (a large antelope from North Africa!) and 4-6 small Axis deer (originally from India & Sri Lanka). The Axis deer we saw were startled by us and a vehicle so started chasing back and forth across the road as we approached, trying to get away, and attempting to jump over the 8’ high fences on each side. It was traumatic watching them jump – not high enough, hit the fence, collapse and run across the road to the other side and do it again. 😢