The motel offered breakfast, but it didn’t really call out to me, so I headed out of town and grabbed a donut and kolache. I love these things: they’re a sweet dough baked around some kind of meat (spicy sausage is common).

A lady asked me if the bugs bothered me. I was naive to them and she said they were a seasonal flying bug that seems to come out for a short time in mid-September.

I hadn’t met them yet, but that was about to change! For hours of riding through Texas and into Louisiana, I felt like I couldn’t catch a break from these things flying into the windshield! They were the main downside, because otherwise it was super seeing the forests and farmland.

I was pleased that my route sent me on the Natchez Trace Parkway for a while. It’s a quiet (no commercial traffic by policy) road that had barely any traffic, and at 50 miles an hour, it was fun to just relax and enjoy the scenery: my route had lots of woods and more farmland beside the road.

It was a fairly long travel day and there was no goal of getting lots of ice cream, so I don’t have a lot else to report.