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I'm off again! This time, I'm planning to cruise down the Gulf Coast, stopping in New Orleans, and then making my way to Key West. My return trip should somehow take me to Georgia and South Carolina, and maybe Arkansas, to fill in some gaps in the map.
My plan for today was to ride from Austin (where I've been staying with my friends Brooke and Christian for the past couple weeks) down to Surfside Beach on the Gulf. It was generally a nice ride. Once I was out of the Austin metro area, it was largely fields and small forests. Lots of grain, with some cotton and corn for variety. The air was fragrant with sweet scents of blossoming flowers, and thick with dragonflies.
I ended up making it to Surfside Beach around 4pm. It's a cute little village-on-stilts on a quiet stretch of beach. I looked around a little bit, and decided to continue on while the light was behind me. There are some golden flowers blooming on the dunes that were really pretty in the late afternoon, and a bunch of wading birds that would fly off whenever I pulled over to take pictures of them.
I'm now in Galveston, which is clearly the tourist trap of this section of coast. There's even a boardwalk with amusement park rides, but I think it's closed for the season. It's not as scenic or quiet as the beaches I stopped at down the coast, but hotels are plentiful and cheap.
One of my favorite albums, Chill Out by the KLF, is a sequence of environmental sounds arranged along a train trip. I hadn't really given a lot of thought to exactly where the train trip was before, but I passed through one of the towns from it today, Lake Jackson.
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