|
Well, that took longer than it was supposed to. The plan was to spend a couple of months in Austin while the weather was bad and then continue riding on my road trip, hitting the southeast and the southwest and then heading back to the Bay Area. But I discovered that I needed shoulder surgery, and ended up renting an apartment in Austin for six months. When my lease was up and my shoulder was (mostly) healed, I decided it was too hot to visit the southwest and too hurricane-prone to visit the southeast, so I flew back to the Bay Area to spend a month while things settled down a bit. Now, finally, I'm on the road again.
My first day was a long one, with some good riding (Texas RT 59 from Jacksboro to Bowie is nice: good pavement, deserted, high speed limits, pretty good scenery. It's slightly curvy, but not super exciting) and a lot of nothing much. I avoided I-35, which probably cost me an hour, but it was nicer to ride through small towns and along more rural roads than to tick past the miles of strip mall sprawl. I had a reuben on pumpernickel with lots of sauerkraut at a German restaurant in Lampasas, and an ice-cream soda at a soda fountain in Jacksboro, and still made it to a motel in Oklahoma City before dark.
I was worried that I'd be too hot in my riding gear in this weather, but I thought it was generally reasonable. I was riding on fast roads, so I had a good breeze on me most of the time. For fun, I got a USB temperature logger. Here's a graph of the temperature in my jacket pocket, over the course of the day. The downward spikes are when I stopped and went into the airconditioned indoors.
One other milestone: my first stop was to a FedEx drop point to drop off Pyriphlegethon, my last laptop, which had (literally) been around the world with me. I'm a bit sad to see it go, but four years is a pretty good useful life for a laptop.
Total riding time: 9:53. Distance 425mi.
|