Jul, I made an instructable just for you: Mushroom Gravy!
Christy has already made one for the dressing. Just disregard all mention of sausage, and you’ll be fine: Apple Cranberry Dressing.
So I am getting older, and arguably wiser, and I have determined that
birthdays are best spent in the company of friends. And beer. And
perhaps some entertaining strangers.
We had a party on November 17. I left my camera out to see what I would get. Mostly blurry pictures of drunk strangers in my former kitchen. But also this:
In the study of bicycling science, it has been established that once a rider is traveling at speeds above 15 mph the wind resistance begins to dominate the energy expenditure of the bicyclist. So imagine how a bicyclist feels in 15 mph headwinds. Like every rotation of the pedals is an extreme effort, even when headed downhill. Yeah, that was me. That’s my excuse for not bicycling the full 82 miles from Tiffany’s house to Austin. She’d asked her dad to drive me to Austin, and he’d agreed, but I felt ridiculous adding three hours of driving to the world, when I could bike it myself. We compromised and he drove me to New Braunfels, which got me fifteen miles out of San Antonio, cutting off a full thirty miles of the ride. We had apple strudel at the oldest bakery in Texas, established in 1868. Would the founders applaud the use of corn syrup and food coloring? I can’t say, but I wasn’t impressed.
The headwinds were brutal, and turned what would have been a nice ride into an effort. I can’t decide if this supports my theory that it’s not worth planning for the predominant winds when planning a bike trip or not. When I rode south I had headwinds of 10 mph, and when I rode north I had headwinds of 15 mph. I should start keeping track of rides with and without headwinds to see if I’m really cursed.
I bought some new grips and gloves when I decided that I would bike back to Austin, and they helped reduce the pain during the ride. Because of the lack of pain, I thought they were helping with the potential numbness, but as I ran my fingers through my hair in the shower I realized that my pinkies were numb. Typing this now, my ring fingers are the numb ones. Note to self: never bike more than ten miles on straight handlebars. I never had a problem with numbness on my curly handlebars, even on my less squooshy Bike Friday bars. Hmm. The internet has this to say: “When your wrist is flexed upwards for a long period of time, the ulnar nerve (which travels from your armpit, around your elbow, through a fascial sheath in your wrist) get compressed.” That poster even claimed to have been to med school. I definitely have my wrists bent in a bad way too much when I’m on straight handlebars. I know I should have flat wrists, like when rowing, but I can’t maintain that position. Hmm.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, yes, San Antonio Rd is different from Old San Antonio Rd. Sometimes routes designed by weekend riders are incredibly dangerous for weekday riders. (FM 2770 was full of gravel trucks, most of which were as considerate as possible, and only one of which came really close to killing me, and it was partly a choice of hitting me vs colliding with the other gravel truck head on.)
And two ways in which the 32-year-old Jessica behaved in a way foreign to the 16-year-old Jessica: first, when the Austin police officer pulled up to me and told me to pick a side, but not bike down the middle of the street (it was a minor side street, but it was rush hour), I just said, “Yes, sir” instead of trying to explain why I was in the right. The second occurrence was when I walked out of the house after sitting for two hours, and felt how sore and stiff my quads were, and decided to jog to loosen them up. And I kept it up for a couple of blocks, until they felt looser. Am I a jock now?
And now for your viewing pleasure, a little bit of an armadillo. If only I had a photographer along for the ride, you, my dedicated readers, would be in for a real treat. Instead, here’s a badly-lit armadillo rear end. And a few other shots of my first ride through Hill Country last week.
Even kilometers, apparently. I don’t know how I managed to misjudge my travel times so badly. I hoped to arrive at TJ’s house by 3 at the latest. I arrived at 5. My extended stop at Target might have had something to do with it. I needed underwear since I had managed to lose mine at Lani’s (I had already packed it, it turned out), and I thought there might be a Starbucks in the Target. There was. I sat outside Target, drinking a Starbucks latte and turned on my Sprint phone. I felt overwhelmed by branding for a moment. Spending all of my time in the hip neighborhoods of large cities, I see much less national branding than most of the country. Plus I don’t watch television. Other people are probably better equipped to deal with life in America, compared to me. I’m missing a key life skill, how to stop paying attention to brands. Even if I hate them. Which I mostly do.
Blanco Road into northern San Antonio is a great biking road. It has a huge shoulder, a bunch of “Share the Road” signs, and a nice smooth set of rolling hills. Apparently it’s part of Lance Armstrong’s training loop from back in the day. Of course, he would bike the loop from Austin. Of course, he wasn’t pulling 60 pounds. I learned this from the Target security guard who noticed me sitting with my bike looking at a map. He advised me to take the frontage road along the 1604 loop to I-10 and then the frontage road along I-10 to the boulevard I wanted. I ended up taking the frontage road along the 1604 loop until NW Military Highway, and then cut across a few subdivisions on De Zevala, which is a great name, and a great street to ride until the last six blocks before Vance Jackson Boulevard. But it all worked out. Then I went a long way on Vance Jackson until just past I-410, and then into the residential neighborhood for a couple miles.
My right pinky and ring finger are disturbingly numb. I probably shouldn’t ride a long distance on those handlebars until I get some gloves, some bar ends, some new grips, or some combination of those three things. My left pinky and ring finger are a little tingly, but less so. [Posting this on Saturday morning, my right pinky is still numb/tingling. Yeek.]
Before I left Austin, I thought I would bike back next week. Now I’m not sure I want to bike back. I would definitely have to get up earlier or take three days to bike. And I’d want to find a different route for much of it. But I’m not sure I need to see more of Texas Hill Country at this point. Though the drivers were almost all much more respectful than I ever imagined. Congratulations, Texas. Lance has made a mark on your psyche.
Not a euphenism, a sad statement of fact. Despite leaving Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood at 10:30am, I didn’t arrive in Blanco until after dark, seven and a half biking hours later. Only one person honked at me on the road into Blanco, a road far too highly traveled and no-shouldered for my comfort. Amazingly, the guy actually pulled off the road a good distance ahead to tell me that he’d almost killed me. I don’t even remember my response. I think I was trying not to hyperventilate at that point. I told him I wasn’t happy to be here either, and I just needed to get to the State Park. But he didn’t even know where that was, less than two miles away. I should have told him, “You’re the only person who’s honked at me out of the dozens that have passed. Maybe everyone else is paying better attention to the road. I am sorry my back light isn’t working, but after all, I could have been a deer.”
Anyway, the day was long, but there were some bright points. Leaving Austin wasn’t really one of them. It’s depressing how long it takes to get clear of a metropolis; I think I was in the southwest exurbs of Austin a good two hours after I’d left. I’d already traveled through the area on the Organic Farm bike tour from hell (incredibly bad routing along very fast highways), so I knew a few highways that were pleasant and a few that were horrible. I was following a route I’d found on bikely.com, but I decided to mix it up at the beginning, because I didn’t want to get on 360 (a famous biking route even though a biker dies there every couple of years). While I was biking past Westgate, I was told by a police on motorcycle that I had to pull over to give the funeral procession right of way. It was a long procession. It’s a tradition I’m not sure I believe in anymore, the big long parade from funeral to burial. It seems passive-aggressively showy.
It turns out my Trek urban fitness bike doesn’t have gears as low as my Bike Friday. I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess, but boy did it make going up the hills of Texas Hill Country hard, despite the fact that all of my gear must have been quite a bit lighter. Hill Country was beautiful, and by the time I got deep into it, the clouds had disappeared and I was feeling the intense sun, even in November. I made a point of taking my water breaks in shade instead of sun. The fields were covered in a golden tall grass, with green roots, like chlorine-damaged blond hair. Fields that were meant for cattle grazing looked an awful lot like similar pastureland in Wisconsin, with the shade trees and the creeks.
I got to Pedernales State Park by about 3, and thought of staying there, but I didn’t want a long day to San Antonio, so I kept going. Perhaps not the best decision. Or maybe it was. I only got to TJ’s house in San Antonio about a half an hour before dusk, and biking in San Antonio after dark seems pretty horrible.
Anyway, it was nice, the sky was still blue, though the sun was getting lower, and I was in Hill Country in the middle of nowhere. In fact, I got to bike down some roads with loose livestock. I avoided quite a few cow pies in the road, and then I had to stop for some cows. I even took pictures. The next back road I turned onto was gravel. I took strength from the idea that maybe gravel roads would be flatter than paved roads. It was vaguely true. I ended up having to ford a creek, barely flowing over the road, but my feet got a tiny bit wet. At that point I was pretty concerned that I wasn’t going to get to Blanco before dark, and fording the creek didn’t put me in a better mood. But seeing the armadillo did! It was digging in the dirt just off the road. At that point I was talking outloud to myself and it, and it was pretty much unconcerned with me. I got my camera out for a few photos, even. It was pretty exciting to see a live one. My coworker from Vanu Inc, Jeff, once asked if I’d even seen a live armadillo, since you see tons of dead ones along the road driving around MidTex. And now I have. It was pretty cute.
So that high lasted a good few kilometers, but then I started to get worried again. I got onto the main road that would lead me into Blanco before dusk, but I didn’t know how far it was to Blanco from there. Too long. I got my headlamp and rear light out after a big hill didn’t turn out to lead me to Blanco. Unfortunately my rear light didn’t have much in the way of batteries. I was surprised there was only one honker, actually.
I made my way to the state park via the grocery store where I ended up buying one small can of Campbell’s pork and beans. It had a pull-off lid. I paid $21 dollars to camp at the State Park (and was told in the morning that the park manager found the envelope only half-stuck in the slot), and I had to go ask the host for the shower code. There comes a point in a biker’s day when reading signs is hard. I had a really hard time figuring out that I could find the shower code from someplace other than Headquarters, which was closed at that point. The idea of there being a shower that I couldn’t access rattled my brains.
I ate, drank a liter of water and a Squirt, read Blood Meridian, a true tale of violence on the Texas border as told by Cormac McCarthy. Jessie had recommended it to me a while ago, and I thought that if I were ever going to read it, now was the time. It’s a different Texas. A bloody killing kind of Texas.
I tried to go to sleep, but my muscles were cramping and sore. Despite being pretty full, I ate a Lara Bar for the potassium. I should have gotten Gatorade instead of Squirt, but I couldn’t resist reliving college memories with the great grapefruit taste.
So I thought it would be fairly straightforward to convert my commuter bike into a bike tourer, provided it was still in good shape. And it was. Rachael used it well and kept it dry. However.
I had forgotten that as a commuter bike, it had special locking skewers, and forgot to get the key tool from Rachael. (Something nagged at my brain, but I just thought I was thinking of a normal lock, which she didn’t have.) Because I don’t have the key tool yet, I can’t replace the tubes, which are over a year old, and could probably stand to be changed in advance of a 200 km ride. I also can’t replace the rear skewer with the special BOB trailer skewer.
So how about changing the flat pedals for clipless pedals? The pedals came right off the commuter bike, surprisingly enough. But TIME ATAC pedals that cost so much, and are hard to find refused to come off of the touring bike. I added TRI-Flow. I used my prybar to bang on the pedal wrench. After consulting with the bike store guy, I tried to put a pipe on the end of the wrench for more leverage. To no avail. My next step is to track down some PB Blaster from an automotive store and do my part for polluting the environment. I guess I could walk my bike over to the bike store again and get them to help me take my pedals off. Blah.
I have a sneaking suspicion I won’t be leaving for San Antonio tomorrow.
Automotive tourists are treated like terrorists when they approach the State Capitol Building of Texas, squawked at through state trooper car-mounted PAs, told to Remain in the Vehicle, Turn Around, and Depart.
I, as a bicyclist, breezed past a couple of state troopers on my normal route from downtown to campus, pumping up the hill to the Capitol and coasting around it. Pedestrians are allowed to wander at all hours, kids run around in the driveway, and people picnic on the lawn.
What a nice perk.
When last we left our intrepid bicyclist, she was getting over the tragic disappearance of her trusty Bike Friday Crusoe. Now we find her standing outside a peeling white clapboard garage in Austin, struggling to get her Trek 520 (aka Torque) freewheel to freewheel. After consulting with the helpful bearded mechanic at Ozone, she finds her trusty steed probably needs a $150 wheel, cassette and chain replacement. Maybe it’s time to break out the Trek 7500fx commuter bike for the ride to San Antonio. Then it’ll only be the cost of the frame pump and helmet. Plus a spare inner tube or two and other sundry items.
Though she blushes to say it, our intrepid bicyclist also finds Austin hot. Breaking into a sweat standing in an alley at 10 am qualifies as hot in her book. At least in November it does.
A careful reader might notice that our intrepid bicyclist is now in Austin. As might an uncareful reader. Regardless, Austin is the location du jour, to be followed by San Antonio (if a working bike can be found), Austin, Denver, Nebraska, SF, and Ithaca. This announcement should probably be withheld until plane tickets are arranged, but that’s the current working theory.