Day Forty-One: Groom - Shamrock

Once again, we slept in way later than necessary. We’re kind of pathetic. The cashier at the gas station next door to the motel had ranted and raved about their homemade breakfast burritos, but by the time we walked over, they were completely sold out. So we made do with some oddly-packaged and processed muffins before stopping for real food at the town market, where we found fresh fruit platters, and I ate every bite except for the melon (does anyone really like honeydew anyways?). We packed up and cranked out our ride that day, which was much flatter than usual and seemed to whiz by without too much suffering. Really, it was kind of uneventful, aside from the occasional smashed armadillo obstructing our path. We rested at a run-down gas station in a town called McClean, where abandoned businesses and unpaved roads seemed to be the norm, yet an animated young woman with a chunky toddler bragged about a William Shatner sighting just the night before in the town restaurant. Something tells me that’s the greatest thing that will ever happen to McClean, Texas.

Some 20 miles later, we arrived in Shamrock, our stopping point for the night. The town was a bit confused, or so it seemed, judging by its extremely southern citizens on streets adorned in green clovers and leprechauns. Small businesses all followed the weird southern/Irish theme, waving flags with leprechauns wearing cowboy hats and things like that, and really, it just made no sense. Our first order of business was to find a camping spot, and Google Maps wasn’t much help. We found two RV parks, but both were on the outskirts of town, without grass and without bathrooms. Just for the record, I’m not afraid of peeing in the woods—but when you have no woods, and you’re actually just peeing on the ground outside your RV neigbor’s window, and they look at you like a hobo digging through their garbage, it’s not that fun. So we asked a few people on the streets if they had any ideas; we rode to the community center and the country club to try to score a patch of grass; but none of our efforts were paying off. Finally, we chatted up a man mowing the lawn outside of a United Methodist Church. He was ecstatic about offering his suggestions, and pointed us in the direction of just what we were looking for. About a mile down the road in a picturesque pasture was a split-level steakhouse perched next to a grassy RV park. The park was empty and ours for the taking, and the hostess inside informed us that there was no need to pay for a spot if we weren’t using the electricity. Comforted by the fact that we no longer had to search for a place to crash, we sat in the restaurant and ate our hearts out (literally) with a traditional meat-and-potatoes style dinner and a Cowboy Brownie. Still not really sure what made that brownie “cowboy”, but I wasn’t complaining. We used their bathroom to clean up before bed, then pitched our tent in the empty grass field and slept with ease.