Lake Fayette, Texas

There is a package for us at the Round Top post office, and there is talk of it weighing almost ten pounds. A package from Oregon to us, full of delightful things, waiting to be opened. That is our motivation today.

We rose to find the air foggy and sticky. We drank our coffee and began our ride. I can’t recall the details of the road because I was thinking about the box in Round Top, full of delightful things from Oregon.

Round Top in a fine little town, population 77. I bought a t-shirt at the general store. It says “Round Top, pop. 77″. The buildings are old and the roads are narrow. People scramble from one antique shop to another, then to get ice cream or some apparently authentic Mexican food. And in the corner of town is a post office; this post office has a large brown box with my name on it. It weighs almost ten pounds…

The box was opened in a very short amount of time. The letter was temporarily thrown aside while we took inventory of a plethora of candy, energy bars, a DVD full of music, magazines, candy, healthy snacks, and candy. The box of goods, prepared by my mother, my brother, and my girlfriend, was a thoughtful token; they may have overseen, however, our ability to carry our new belongings with us. We worked for some time to stuff every last chocolate chip cookie into small crevices in our panniers.

Barely rolling, we continued to our camp site. It was an expensive grassy hill with clouds of insects. We were on the shore of a lake, which we shared with a mammoth power plant some miles across the body of probably contaminated water. We were several yards from the boat launch, where fishermen noisily launched and gathered up their boats until midnight when the park closed.

But we didn’t really care; we have over a pound of M&Ms.