Member Don Dejong sent us this nice article about host Liz Rogers which was published in the Marfa, Texas, USA, Big Bend Sentinel. It's reprinted here by permission of the author, Lonn Taylor. It sounds like Liz is quite a marvelous host. Thanks for your gift to the community, Liz!

By LONN TAYLOR

Liz Rogers of Alpine may be the most hospitable person in the Big Bend. Over the past four months she has entertained 30 house guests. All of them have been complete strangers, and all of them have arrived at her house on bicycles. Rogers, a lawyer who is a public defender for the federal court system, is part of a network of hosts all over the country who provide overnight housing for transcontinental bicyclists. She told me that when she first started opening her house to them her friends all told her that she was going to be murdered in her sleep or at least wake up to find her house looted. “Oh, sure,” she says she told them, “someone on a bicycle is going to steal my piano?” She says that her overnight visitors have been “almost 100% delightful.”

Rogers, who is six feet tall and has a deep, smoky voice that sounds a little like Talluhlah Bankhead’s, is someone who appears to be delighted by most things that happen to her. She has a finely honed sense of humor and once arrived at a Miss America contest-watching party that my wife was giving seated on the folded-down top of her boyfriend’s 1963 Pontiac Catalina convertible dressed in a bathing suit and wearing a ribbon that said “Miss Montell.” She is from the town of Montell in Uvalde County, which has a population of 20. She has more friends than anyone I have ever known.

Rogers started taking in overnight bicyclists in 2006. She was passing through Brackettville one day and got to talking with two Canadian cyclists in a filling station there. They were headed west on U.S. 90, so she invited them to spend the night at her house when they reached Alpine. They had such a good time that they told her she should sign up as a potential host on a warmshowers.org, a web site for touring cyclists. Warmshowers describes itself as a “reciprocal hospitality site” and it serves an international clientele; a quick sampling shows cyclists requesting accommodations in Holland, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and the San Blas Islands. Rogers says that most of her guests are riding the Southern Tier route, a 3100-mile stretch between San Diego, California and San Augustine, Florida. Cyclists following this route east take U.S. 90 from Van Horn through Alpine to Del Rio and then continue on to Austin or San Antonio. The Southern Tier is popular because it is the shortest route across the United States and it can be ridden from early spring to late fall.

Rogers has become a legend along the Southern Tier. One of her guests, Dan Attenburg, who was riding west toward San Diego in the summer of 2008, told me how he found her. “As I was traveling,” he wrote, “I heard from the occasional long distance traveler about a woman in the Sanderson/Alpine area who opened her home to those on two self-powered wheels.” Attenburg contacted Rogers by e-mail and she invited him to stay overnight in a house she owns in Sanderson, then put him up the next night in her home in Alpine, and then forwarded him on to her boyfriend, Mike O’Connor, in Marfa on the third night. Attenburg remembers that she came home from work to fix him lunch and what he described as “a pitcher of iced tea that only a long-distance cyclist in summer dreams about” the day he arrived in Alpine, and she gave him a small dinner party that evening.

A lot of Rogers’ guests comment on her cooking. Amaya Williams, e-mailing me from Venezuela, recalled her making a delicious pecan pie, and the scrapbook she keeps of thank-you notes is full of references to pork tenderloin dinners and “big Texas breakfasts.” Other guests were overwhelmed by the network of hospitality that she opened to them. Konrad and Stacy Kessler of Rochester, New York, wrote me that when they contacted her as they were cycling east through New Mexico, she directed them first to her brother Park in Fort Hancock, then to her friend Bill Love in Sierra Blanca, from there to Mike O’Connor in Marfa, then to Rogers’ own homes in Alpine and Sanderson, and finally to her mother in Montell.

Rogers has even been known to recruit cyclists who have not contacted her in advance as guests. One couple, writing in a travel blog under the name Double Leo, recalled that they had stopped their bikes in front of a grocery store in Alpine and were looking at a map when “a woman named Elizabeth” approached them and asked if they needed a place to sleep. That was Liz Rogers. “We were blown away by her offer to us, total strangers,” they concluded.

When I asked Rogers why she takes in strangers, she said, “I like to meet interesting people, and travelers are always interesting.” People who travel by bicycle tend to be especially interesting.

Take, for instance, a couple who stayed with Rogers last year, an Italian and his American wife – he was 63, she was 45 – who had been traveling around the world as vagabonds for 8 years. They had left their sailboat docked in Guaymas, Sonora, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to British Columbia and back, and were cycling from the Pacific to the Atlantic when they stopped off in Alpine. “They didn’t read newspapers or watch television,” Rogers said. “They were totally disconnected. They didn’t know who the president was, but they were delightful people.”

One of her English visitors, whom she remembers only as Astrid, was a middle-aged lady who told Rogers that she had bought a second-hand book at an Oxfam bookshop in London that changed her life. The book was A Bike Ride: 12000 Miles Around the World, by Anne Mustoe, herself a middle-aged English lady who in 1987 quit her job as headmistress of a girl’s school, bought a bicycle, and rode it across Europe, Asia, and North America. Astrid was following in her footsteps and had ridden alone across the Middle East and Egypt before tackling North America.

Travelers in Texas in the 19th century frequently commented that they could always find a bed, a meal, and fodder for their horse at any cabin that they stopped at. Liz Rogers is continuing that Texas tradition into the 21st century, and she throws in a warm shower.

Lonn Taylor is a writer and historian who lives in Fort Davis.