Day 11
Sun 16th Aug

After a breakfast of homemade rolls and jam, we said goodbye to Dale, Liz and Owen and got off on our way. We rode back to Marvell and got back on to the trail, and as promised the dust began. It wasn’t anywhere near as deep as Dale had warned us though, and I’m pleased we didn’t go round it like he’d advised. We’re not ones to give up easily, and would much rather try and fail than to give it a miss altogether.

 

 

If you rode relatively slowly it was pretty easy to ride in, but if you rode faster and got stuck in a rut it was a bit more of a challenge, which I discovered rather spectacularly while doing a ride by with Ed filming. I was doing fine as I approached him and rode past him, but I ended up going a bit too fast and got stuck in a rut, which caused me to wobble violently from side to side before being slammed on to the ground. I hit my head pretty hard, and immediately thought I was going to get a concussion. We had the intercoms running at the time, and as my tyres had already caused a dust cloud Ed couldn’t actually see what had happened, and only heard ‘ouch’ or something similar after I’d landed. It was only after the dust had settled that he saw me staggering around rubbing my head, looking rather ‘antiqued’.

 

 

Thankfully I was wearing a full face helmet and all my gear, as I always do and always will, and apart from a minor head injury, a mouthful of dust, a slightly bruised elbow, a broken mirror and a relocated headlight, I was all good. I even managed the customary ‘look what I did’ pose, but I did struggle a bit to have a conversation with a guy who stopped to see if we were ok.

 

 

We continued on, with me taking it steady, and after a short stretch of gravel we were back on to the dust again. I really can’t believe how dusty it was, that stuff gets everywhere, literally. We pulled over to rig the camera up to get some footage, but as I went to pull away nothing happened. There was no resistance in the throttle and we soon discovered that my throttle cable had snapped.

 

 

 

Being me I was ready to wave the first truck down for assistance, but Ed had other ideas. He really is brilliant when it comes to fixing things and bodging, and after a fair bit of Ed March wizardry I soon had a throttle again, operated by the front brake. Yes that’s right, I had to pull the front brake in to go faster and let it out to slow down. Needless to say I went hurtling forward unintentionally on several occasions, much to Ed’s amusement, but I soon got used to it and actually quite liked it after a while.

 

 

After that we had more dust, gravel, dust, then gravel again, and the scenery consisted of trees and lots of flat farmland. It was really hot, and we were overjoyed when we found a badly setup irrigation system that soaked the trail. We sat in it for about five minutes literally soaking it up, before eventually managing to tear ourselves away. We very much enjoyed the cooling we got from the water and the wind as we rode, despite it being short lived as the sun baked us back to dry within minutes.

 

 

The trail continued to run between fields of farmland, and I really enjoyed the grass and dirt combo that we got between them, it was really easy to ride on.

 

 

We soon arrived in a town called DeVal Bluff, where we decided to stop for the night. Being Sunday pretty much everything was closed, although most of the buildings looked like they didn’t open on the weekdays either. After some food in the only place that was open, we stopped off at the fuel station to get some bug spray. It was there that Ed met the local mayor, who pointed us in the direction of the county run campsite and said that we could camp there for free. He chatted to Ed about the history of the town and the civil war, before giving him 2 commemorative coins. He said that if anyone asked if we’d paid our fees, we were to show the coins and say that the mayor said we could camp for free; random but sounded good to us!

It was dark by the time we got to the campsite, and as we rode in I spotted a big bird fly overhead. I quickly redirected my headlight up in to the trees, which was already pointing in that vague direction anyway thanks to my tumble, and saw that it was an owl. I’d never seen one in the wild before so it was a particular highlight for me.

 

 

Apart from a random RV we were the only ones in the campground, so after putting up the tent we rigged up our pocket shower and had a rather liberating naked shower under the trees. We’re pretty sure that they couldn’t see us, but being horrendously clammy and equally as dusty we really didn’t care if they could.