When we caught up with Massachusetts Elite Series rookie Mark Burgess early last week, he’d left home early to avoid a nasty snowstorm, only to wake up to the inclement weather 600 miles later in Virginia.

We’re happy to report that he made it to the Great Republic of Texas two days later, unscathed and without needing to use his snow shovel again. Prior to heading to Del Rio, he stopped off in Zapata to fish Falcon for a few days.

“The ride was everything I thought it would be,” he said. “I’ve driven to the Skeeter factory in Kilgore plenty of times and to Rayburn, but I didn’t realize how far down this is. Everything looks real close on the map, but what seems like it should take an hour or two ends up taking four or five.”

As the only New Englander on the Elite Series this year (no one from Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island or his home state of Massachusetts will join him in Bubba-land), Burgess hails from an area to which tourists flock in order to see the flora and fauna, and in particular the fall foliage. So when he got to south Texas and couldn’t find a tree over about 12 feet high he felt a little out of place. Fortunately his one-ton truck toting an 11.5” slide-in camper and towing a boat didn’t look all that out of place to any of the three Border Patrol checkpoints that stopped him and then quickly allowed him to pass.

The Falcon detour allowed him a chance to test out all of his equipment and tune a bunch of baits. It also gave him an opportunity to get acclimated to the heat. Furthermore, he camped next to the Chapman family, and Brent has provided him a crash course on Elite Series ins and outs.

“I didn’t even know what I didn’t know,” Burgess said of Chapman’s teachings.

Lesson #1: Lose the shovel. But as this picture, taken by Chapman from the roof of Mark’s camper shows, old habits die hard.