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[Ride Report] There's no going back 02/21/04

Tourmeister

Keeper of the Asylum
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Huntsville
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Scott
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Friday
Howdy,

Here are the pics:
http://twtex.com/linkfiles/022104-centex/

:tab It is nice not to have to worry about where we were going for a change. I just follow Paul and trust he knows where we are going. I'm not really paying attention to what roads we are on, where we are turning, nothing. I'm just enjoying a nice day and a great ride.

:tab We stop in Cameron for some sightseeing. The Courthouse is very cool:

Courthouse 1 / Courthouse 2
War Memorial to locals that died from WWI through Vietnam
Cornerstone for the Courthouse
The old jail, now a museum. Very cool building
Backside of the jailhouse

:tab After checking out the old town square, we tool over to Hwy 36 and find the Texan Cafe where we stop for lunch. The grilled cheese and fries is excellent. Paul scarfs down a massive burger. The man can pack his food away! Amazingly he is not grossly overweight! After lunch we gas up the bikes and head out of town on yet another little FM to nowhere.

:tab I have a vague idea of where we are. Many of the roads are really nice. Some could definitely use a good repaving! One in particular has lots of fine white gravel strategically located to achieve the maximum stretching of the seat cover and tensing of the tush :shock: Cresting a hill to find a gravel coated curve on the other side makes for some serious clenching :-| As we are riding somewhat conservatively, we manage to negotiate the curves and continue on our way, waiting for our pulse rates to settle back to normal.

:tab We pass through Rockdale and somewhere along the line pick up FM 487 I think. This road has some really great smooth curves a few miles before Bartlett. I'm talking back to back, banked, perfect curves with excellent visibility. A perfect place to test the limits of your lean angle :twisted: Not that I would do such a thing of course :angel: But Paul... :roll:

:tab As we are putting along through Bartlett, I spot an interesting building back a block or so off the main road. I toss a beep or two from my pathetic bike horn at Paul and we pull over to investigate. Here is what we find.

A very cool looking old school
The history behind the school
The bell tower with no bell. The one on the ground is welded in place so it cannot be rung. Not that I tried...
Old school meets new school!

:tab Once we get out West of Bartlett, I am into unfamiliar territory. Where Paul leads, I follow. The roads are a great combination of really fast sweepers and a little bit of 30mph stuff. Most of the pavement out here is ofgood quality. There is a point though where I am accelerating through a long right hander and I start to feel the backend break loose. :eek: I resist the urge to freak out, strong as it is, and instead just stay on the gas looking far into the corner. Ever so slightly, I lift the bike up just enough that the tire hooks right back up and away I go! It all happens in the space of a few heartbeats.

:tab By mid afternoon, it is actually starting to get a little warm. We get somewhere near Killeen and Paul takes me up a short hill that affords a nice view looking out over Still House Reservoir. We goof off and take a few pics. Imagine that?

The VFR with Killeen in the distance
Typical Central Texas terrain
Looking back towards the reservoir

:tab After shooting our pics, we cruise to a park somewhere on the lake and take a pit stop break. Army Shnook "banana" Choppers are thumping through the sky in the distance. It brings back memories of my early years when Dad was stationed at Fort Hood as part of the 2nd Armored Division from 70-74, the height of the Vietnam War. We lived in Copperas Cove. I remember being out in the yard, sitting up in my cool tree house and huge formations of these massive choppers would come flying over at very low altitude. They were low enough I could wave at the guys in the side windows and they'd wave back. The low frequency assault on my body is something I'll never forget. As a six year old it was just a notch shy of geek Nirvana seeing these awesome machines, sound like thunder pealing from their rotors, pounding my chest and rattling the windows of the house below. Way cool!

:tab After our break, we head into Killeen and pick up US 190. We run this over to Copperas Cove where I manage to find my way to our old house. The earliest memories from my childhood are in fragments. They are isolated events that lack continuity. As I trace up through the years, the memories become stronger and more clearly part of an ordered line of memories. I remember living in other towns prior to Coppers Cove, but it is here where it really all starts. I was four when we moved here.

:tab I recall that the house we moved into was brand new. This was a big deal as we had never lived in a new house. It was the typical three bedroom, two bath, two car garage on about a 1/4 acre. At the time, that 1/4 acre seemed like a massive estate to me. We had a huge Live Oak tree in the backyard that stood next to a nice creek that always seemed to have water running in it. Oddly enough, we lived on Creek St. Growing up in the military, we lived in a lot of different places. For some reason, 712 Creek Street has stayed in my memory despite all the other myriad addresses over the years having faded to oblivion. That combined with the huge water tower on the hillside were all that I needed to find the old house.

:tab One thing I have learned when revisiting old places is that you can never go back. I have all the wonderful memories tucked away in my head. We had a really cool tree house in the big Oak tree, a main level that our Dad helped us build, and then several smaller levels on other branches. We had the rope swing, the ladders, and the wacky 70's shag carpet wall to wall and ceiling to ceiling. There was a lot of new construction in the area and it was fertile grounds for treehouse material! I recall all the games of cowboys and indians, GI Joe (the big giant dolls), Jungle Jim, Big Wheels, skateboards, you name it and we played with it. The whole neighborhood was crammed with kids about our age whose parents were also in the service. We spent four incredible years here, first through fourth grade for me. I really cherish those memories.

:tab Now we are standing here in the road, and I am looking back into my past and it is totally foreign. The house doesn't look anything like I remember. The brick has been painted over. The trees I knew so well are long gone and there are new ones in their place. The lots seems so tiny, the street so narrow. Once we were on the very edge of town, facing what I thought at the time was an expansive wilderness, but now has given way to more development. Coming back just drives the last nail into the coffin of a buried reality, the memories are all that will ever be left of that place.

The old house
What has become of the expansive wilderness...

:tab It has been right at 30 years since I was last here. It is neat to come back even if it is not like a homecoming. I look at the houses I used to visit and wonder what has become of all the kids I played with during those years. What do they do now? Where are they? Do they have kids of their own? Do they look back on those times with the same fondness that I do? I wonder who has lived in the homes in the intervening years? It all seems like another lifetime, almost as if it happened to someone else.


:tab After a last look around, Paul and I head out. I drive up a few of the roads I remember and see the old schools. Even those are hardly recognizable. The old playground is still there. Although it now has one of those new multi/everything/swing/slide monster thingies. But off to one side is the little slide, the one with the little cover at the top and the whoop-dee-whoop slide part. We spent hours playing on that thing. It was a rocket ship that took us to other worlds, it was a sailing ship that sailed the distant seas and visited tropical islands, it was a mighty battleship taking us into harms way, and just about anything else we could think of. That one little slide is all that is left of the playground I remember. What a strange feeling it is to be so vividly reminded of the transitory nature of our lives...

:tab As we head out of town, Paul once again moves up to take point. It's getting late in the afternoon and we start working our way South towards Austin via the backroads. Somewhere along the line we wind up on a little narrow roller coaster of a county road. It is great fun. We wind up next to an old cemetery and a cool looking metal bridge. Paul informs me that we are somewhere near Maxdale. Never heard of it? No surprise there! We're out in the middle of the sticks! But this bridge thing is cool. The engineer in me gets all a tingle :-P We hop off the bikes and stroll over to take a look. The bridge is no longer open to vehicular traffic.

Looking upriver at the new fangled concrete bridge
It's a long way down! Geez! I need new boots!
The road surface is rotting 2 X 4's on edge with a thin pavement over them!
The view from down under
The rotting understructure

:tab We goof of here for a good twenty minutes or so before heading back to the bikes. It's really cool seeing stuff like this out in the middle of nowhere. It takes my mind off of all the crazy stuff going on in the rest of the world "out there". The sun is starting to get low on the horizon so we start getting serious about getting on to Austin. I told Will we would meet him for dinner this evening around 6:30pm.

:tab The last little FM we take is a lot of fun. I don't recall what number it is but it drops us out on Hwy 183 Way North of Austin. While we are sitting at the stop sign waiting to pull out onto the highway, Paul motions back to my right. There is a group of sportbikes pulled over in a little gravel parking lot. Well I certainly cannot drive off without going over and meeting them! Turns out that Dad is leading a ride on his Cruiser and his son and friends are following on a herd of brand new CBR600RR's, GSXZ-R600's, 1000's, Kawasaki ZX6-RR, blah blah blah... All of them have paper tags :shock: The good thing is that most of them seem to have on decent gear. After the Dad shows us some cool back roads in the area and draws us a map, I hand out a few TWT cards and then we take off for Will's place.

:tab We get to Will's and he is nowhere to be found. :-| He doesn't answer his cell phone. So we head over to John "Irondawg" Morin's house a few blocks away to see if Arthur is home. He's John's roomie. No dice. So back to Will's and we just hang out in the driveway contemplating what we might do if Will doesn't show up? There are other TWT folks here in town but how to get a hold of them? I don't have any phone numbers and I hardly know most of their real names so I can't very well call information! By the time we get to the point where we are about to to get dinner and really think about what we're going to do, Will drives up. Seems he had to work late today. Okay.

:tab After unloading the bikes, we head into town to get some BBQ at Rudy's. Their moist brisket just melts in my mouth. As usual, I am the last one eating. Will and Paul eat so fast it amazes me. :shock: You'd think they had to fight for their food as kids!? We hang out for a while to let the lump in our guts settle and then head back to Will's to hang out for the evening. Some good sipping whiskey, a nice fire in the fireplace, and some good music...

:tab Sunday morning we get up bright and early to head down to Wimberly to meet Achim for breakfast at the Cypress Creek Cafe. Will is beat and choses to go back to bed. Paul and I head out into an overcast morning. Our goal is to get to the Cafe by 9:00am. It is a little further from the far North side of Austin all the way down to Wimberly than we think! A few miles North of Wimberly it starts to rain :mad: I don't want to stop though because we are almost there. When we arrive, Achim has been waiting patiently and is already eating breakfast, hehe. We settle in, warm up and have breakfast as well.

:tab When it comes time to leave, Paul and I spend a good ten minutes putting on all our various layers of rain gear in anticipation of a long wet ride. Barely a few miles East of town the rain lets up and it is dry for the rest of the day. We make a quick stop by Achim's house and say hello to Angela and then head out for home, the long way. We head up I-35 to the start of FM 1327 and head East. This side of Austin is nothing special to look at, actually, it is kind of blah in general :-| We reach US 183 and head North to the start of FM 973. My goal it to get up to FM 969, a road I have long been eyeing on my maps but have just never been able to explore for one reason or another.

:tab The ride up FM 973 is lame. The road is lame. The scenery is lame. The huge landfill reeks :puke: But, we endure and eventually reach the turn for FM 969. Now this is a nice little road. There is a little more traffic than I would like, but otherwise it is a nice ride. The road surface is very smooth, looking like it has been redone recently. The road generally winds its' way to the Southeast roughly following the Colorado River. There is some really nice scenery and some awesome homes. The curves are the nice big sweepers where we can really lay on the throttle while leaned over. :twisted: Eventually we drop out onto Hwy 21 just West of Bastrop. We cruise into town and head for the Bastrop State Park. We've heard so much about Park Road One that I want to check it out for myself.

:tab The entrance fee is only a dollar. Paul leads the way back into the park. The road is not much more than a single lane and it goes up and down, up and down, round and round... There are pine needles everywhere. This is most definitely NOT a go fast road. That's cool though because I really enjoy the liesurely cruise through the woods. We drive down into an area where there are rental cabins made of local stones.

The road down to the cabins
A sampling of the local stone and mason work
The view from an overlook
The Gazebo with a weight problem
The bikes in front of the main lodge
The entrance to the main lodge

:tab We head out of the South end of the park. It is a nice ride. We are just tooling along at about 30-35mph. Even though it is only a few miles, it seems to go on and on at this speed. One moment, all is quiet and peaceful, and then in the next two bikes come ripping around the corner at me and then vanish in a roar behind me. Several guys on what look like dragbike style cruisers are out here tearing it up!? Nutjobs :roll: As we reach the South end of the road, we stop at another overlook. It is still very overcast but we can see quite a long way. No pictures though because it is too dreary. There are a lot of other little side roads, mostly gravel, that I would love to explore if I had more time and a BMW R1150GS :-P

:tab We drop out onto FM 153 and head East. The stretch of 153 between FM 2104 and US 77 is nice, more fast sweepers. When we reach US 77, we have the choice of heading South toward La Grange and then coming back North again to pick up FM 2981, or exploring a little unnamed road that my map shows as connecting between 153 and 2981, a shortcut if you will, hehe. We opt for the shortcut. At first going, this seems like a good thing. Then we round a corner and come face to face with big chunks of gravel. We stop and contemplate it for a few moments, then with a glance at each other and a nod, off we go.

:tab The road under the gravel is a pretty serious washboard surface. The gravel itself is huge chunks of white rocks. I'm not talking about the kind of gravel that you slide on when you try to turn or brake. I am talking about chunks so big they move the bike from side to side when we hit them!! It's rough going, but it should only be a mile or two further... right? I slip into second gear to reduce the severity of unintended throttle inputs at the back tire. Nonetheless, there are still several times when the rear breaks loose and starts to spin. :shock: A quick look in the mirror confirms that Paul is having the same fun as myself. We pass by a home with everyone out in the yard apparently doing a cookout with friends and family. As we go by, I see all of them stop what they are doing and look over at us in total disbelief :lol: They have to be wondering what is wrong with us. None to soon, the road finally comes to a dusty end and we find ourselves looking at the start of FM 2981. That wasn't so bad and it saved us a lot of time!

:tab We hop on FM 2981 and shoot down to FM 159 for the run into Fayetteville. When we get into town I spot some sportbikes parked over on the town square. Of course we stop to chat and I hand out some more TWT cards. We're not sure where in town to pick up FM 1291 so we tag along with these guys and they lead the way. The lead bike is a nice Duc ST-4s booming it's way down the road. The second bike is an older Kawasaki Concours ridden by a father and his 12-13 yr old son. Once out of town on the twisty stuff, the ST is gone. The poor fellow on the Concours is wallowing through the corners fighting his son who is leaning against the bike!! I back off to give them lots of room because I don't want the dad thinking he has to hustle on my account.

:tab About five miles East of town, FM 1291 gets real interesting. For the next few miles the road has a lot of back to back esses that are fairly sharp but can be ridden quickly. The Concours is wallowing wildly. Paul and I drop way back and let him get ahead so we can enjoy ourselves. This is the first time I have run out here. The area is exceptionally popular with the riders in the Houston area. However, it is quite frequent that I read about someone having gone down out here on a group ride :-| When we get to FM 109, our friends head South and we continue on toward New Ulm.

:tab We run FM 1094 East out of New Ulm and soon find ourselves coming up behind a large group of bikes. Most of the group looks like cruisers. The guy bringing up the rear is on what looks like a Duc of some sort. I'm not sure he is actually part of the group though. When we reach FM 949 we cut Northeast. This is a nice short stretch of road with some more fun sweepers. The pavement is good. The scenery is just rolling open pastureland with occasional patches of forest. Then at FM 2429 we head North for Hwy 36. This FM is just a straight shot up to 36, no frills.

:tab We run Hwy 36 up into Bellville where we catch Hwy 159 and run up to Hempstead. Just South of Hempstead we are cruising along with the flow of traffic. I do a head check in the mirror and see nothing unusual. Scarcely a few seconds later, some kind of Kawasaki Ninja screams around me and is gone just as fast! We're going about 75mph, I'm guessing this kid was well into the triple digits!! Other than his helmet, he does not seem to be wearing much gear :-| I sure hope he does not go down at those speeds!!

:tab In Hempstead we stop for a break at the DQ. I call Beth to let her know how far out we are and to see if she'd like to meet us at King's Cafe for dinner. She is already out shopping in Conroe, so she argees to drive over and meet us. While standing in the parking lot I am checking out what is left of the Hempstead Inn B&B across the street. When I was a student at Texas A&M, we would get a large group together and come down here for dinner. It was $10 for all you could eat and they would start bringing out these huge bowls of taters, beans, cornbread, rolls, fried catfish, chicken, whatever you can think of. Now the place looks terrible, but it does look like they are making an effort to clean it up and do some restoration.

:tab We head out of town on FM 1488. This is another road I have never managed to explore. I generally don't get this far South when I am riding. So it is nice to ride somewhere new for a change. Heading out of town the road is nice. A few more miles and it starts to wind gently through the pastures. This seems to be a fairly busy road though and there is quite a bit of traffic. For a short bit, FM 362 and 1488 run together. When 362 peels off to the North, we follow it. A few more miles and we hang a left on FM 2979. The first mile or two is great fun and then it straightens out. So we just spin around and run it back to FM 362 and keep heading North. The rest of 362 up to Hwy 105 is really nice. There aren't any spectacular curves, it is just real pretty countryside.

:tab We hit Hwy 105 and drone over to Montgomery and find Beth waiting for us. Apparently, we have just missed Debbie. She got out and rode her bike alone for the first time and the waitress tells us that she was just here a few minutes ago and just left :shrug: Oh well, it is nice to see she's getting out and having fun on the bike! We have a nice dinner and then shoot up through the Sam Houston National forest on FM 149 to get home. All told, 600 miles on the weekend. It was a real hoot. Paul makes for a great travelling partner.

Here's his spin on the trip:
http://www.twtex.com/forums/showthread.php?t=986

Adios,
 
Last edited:
Tourmeister said:
:tab ....The last little FM we take is a lot of fun. I don't recall what number it is but it drops us out on Hwy 183 Way North of Austin.

That was FM 963 between Oakdale and Watson. It winds around following the curves of a small river. There's a spot about halfway along the road where the water tumbles over some low falls. You'll see the local kids cooling off there in the summer.

County Road 223 north off of 963 in Oakdale is another fun road that eventually becomes FM 3170. That will take you back up to Hwy 190. You can make a jog back to the east a couple of miles on 190 to the town of Kempner, then pick up the backroads to Lampasas and beyond - one of which happens to be the very entertaining FM 580.

There are lots of roads yet to explore in that area! 8-)
 
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