Warts Wind and all

Today's Blogger is Dan Fishwick.

I’m not sure there has been a time in my life that I have spent two straight weeks in a state other than Ohio, with a different town each night and others through the day. Three out of Peter and Carl’s seven weeks will have been spent in Texas. Now it’s hard to believe that my own part in this trek is nearly over.

Bicycling seems like such a simple sport/form of transportation. Get on a bike and go. But listen in to our conversations and you will hear about complexities and nuances you never dreamed of. Bike-shoes- and-pedals is one of those things. The better riders wear clip-on shoes with special pedals to clip onto. These take a little getting used to, but everyone who has tried them swear they’re the only way to go because you apply energy both on the downward motion and the pull-up motion of your legs. Sam and I have been using toe-straps and tennis shoes, not so efficient, but when we get off in town we don’t click around the cafes like lost tap or ice dancers. Then there’s the plain flat pedal.

We’ve met up with another Adventure Cycling group the last few days. One of their lead cyclists is a man of about hundred years in age, always in sleeveless cotton shirts, probably getting a little vacation before he returns to the North Pole to prepare for the holidays. Anyway, he’s a flat pedal guy in Birkenstock sandals. Thinks all the rest of us are wooses, I’m sure.

Other issues are about the kind of bike you ride, best alloys, gearing ratios, maintenance, fixing flats, etc., and proper nutrition and supplements you need to carry on and on and on. No need to go on. During the day most of our conversations at stops has to do with the deadly or heavenly variables: temperature, rain, wind, traffic, road conditions, and hills. Today the temperature, dry air, and general road conditions were the heavenly part. That simply means nobody mentioned them.

Ah, but the wind. A front is coming in from the north today and blowing hard, whistling even through the walls of the motel room in Lockhart where I write. On a windless road (no such thing in Texas, so let’s say crosswind), you can average maybe 16 mph. Get a wind to your back and you can cruise in the low twenties. But when you turn into a nasty headwind you’re slogging along at 8 to 10. Same effort if you’re geared right, just takes you twice as long to get there. We had a serious study of all kinds of wind today.

We came out of the Texas hill country this morning, leaving Blanco and its surrounding ranches of what one might guess to be the retreats of the more well-heeled San Antonio crowd. These were marked by sliding gates, the name of the ranch in ornate metal works, and tasteful landscaping along a massive stone wall. The towns of Wimberly and Kyle began to have a more suburban feel—beautiful town squares whose old general stores now housed art boutiques of bronze sculptures of the Wild West, or real estate agents, or yoga centers.

The ubiquitous pick-up trucks of West Texas have given way to people driving SUVs, living near the interstate (I-35) and commuting to Austin. Several in the group remarked that these folks took up more than their share of the road, drove fast, and often blasted their horns as they passed. One guy went by me as I was hugging the thin white line on the edge of the road with maybe six inches between me and a deep ditch. He honked and I saw him pointing as he went by to indicate, I suppose, that I should have been cycling in the ditch. My theory is that most of these commuters are not from here (Texas), but they have come to (mis)understand the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas” (actually begun as an anti-littering campaign) to mean “Don’t mess with me.”

The ride to Lockhart has taken us back into a lower, flatter land of agriculture. The sides of the road have a coating of cotton, blown from fields. There are surprising housing developments sprung from old farms, reminding me of the aerials I’ve seen of Medina (Ohio) with it’s beautiful downtown and the subdivisions mixed in with cornfields. As we turned right in old and charming Lockhart to get to our motel a couple miles south, we biked on a wide highway flanked by all of America’s well-known franchises. At one intersection, a red light that was maybe too long, Charles (Breer) perused the landscape and said something like “How did it get like this?”

It’s a wide and beautiful country, warts, wind and all. And this is the way to see it. I’ve enjoyed this group and our travels together. Stay safe.