TOURING TANNER ROAD
Tanner Road west of Beltway 8 has a lot of forest and cow pastures which haven’t yet been turned into industrial parks and $300,000 houses. So, Slumbag and Prickly Bush were able to lay a trail in the area with interesting variety.
We started at an elementary school and clambered over the barrier to a running path along a ditch which drains the golf course on the north side of Tanner Road. To give their prairie subdivisions a bit of hauteur, the developers of the upscale houses have taken to digging ponds around them and installing pumped fountains to spray like geysers out of the middle of them. To maintain the sterile artificiality of these ponds, which would otherwise attract wildlife, they pour in food coloring and other chemicals so the subdivision has a little lake which supports no fish and which no one is allowed to swim in. We circled a couple of these on our way to a back check, whose true path led us into the Shiggy.
Shortcutters Screwed, Blued, Tattooed. While the true trail went east into the thicket, there seemed to be a clearer path on the far side of a fence a hundred yards to the south. Roller Balls and P.P. crossed the fence and headed along the cowpath at high speed. Balut, Worm, and your humble servant followed at a slower pace, hoping to see the true trail cross southward and reward our shortcut. No such luck. Roller wisely turned back, the rest of us pressed on and went smack into a giant wall of thorny dewberry bushes and poison ivy. We broke out on Clay Road, where Dick Head had unluckily gone into the archery range. The only lucky thing was that all the arrows missed. The shortcutters had to dodge the traffic on Clay until they reached the concrete dike just short of Beltway 8. From there, we could see the pack crossing the dike in a northward direction.
The Beer Check. The checks on this trail were tricky. Not overly difficult or deceptive, but some of them took a long time to solve. The check at the dike was a good example. Checkers ran west and east, searching for a breach in the woods outside the dike. At last, we found one to the west of the check and crawled through the brush to a barbed-wire fence where we broke out onto the unattended beer check. Unfortunately, Digital Input gouged one of her fingers on the wire. We had no first aid to offer her except the antibacterial properties of ice water and canned beer.
End of the line. Like most of the checks, the beer check hung us up for a while and it wasn’t just thirst. We found an arrow which seemed to be pointed the wrong way (maybe it was intended for walkers?) while the trail appeared to swing to the west and north through the light-industrial area north of Tanner. By this time, quite a few of us were walking, so it was a good thing we found the on-home about half a mile off Tanner.
On-home. The hares gave us a nice assortment of premium beer in two flavors and munchies. At the circle, Jeremy was named Chupacabra. That’s Spanish for goat sucker, in reference to his sexual preference for smelly underage livestock. I guess it’s not just goats who are the horny ones.
Your faithful scribe,
Silent Dick
P.S. Every year, the local Mexicans celebrate something called Cinco de Mayo. I like mayonnaise as much as anybody, but I don’t see why the Mexicans have a special holiday for a sandwich spread.