Thursday, March 16, 2006

Take me home, country roads. Or not.

Well, after much waffling, I decided to attend the Montgomery county TWTex gathering at Phil’s Roadhouse in Montgomery. This is an every Thursday meet which rotates locations within the county. It’s kind of far away for me, 34 miles or 1:15 driving time, but I didn’t have much else to do tonight except sit and watch TV with my parents.

I left home just after 6 and took some back roads out of my community to get over to FM2920 to SR249 to FM149 (Lots of 9s).

It’s interesting to compare the whole roads paradigm to California. In CA, all the roads basically run up valleys or over mountain ranges. If you cross too many valleys or go too far up some roads, you’ll have a hard time getting home and have fewer choices in routes to do so. Each day of riding requires careful planning to get home by dark.

In the Houston area, there are major roads just a few miles away anywhere you go. You could easily pick a direction and go out and get yourself lost. Getting home is just a matter of pointing yourself in the right direction. There are pretty much guaranteed to be roads to take you where you want to go.

Anyway, so tonight I went up some new country roads. They were very rural. There were fields of dairy cows, old barns, and cute little crossroads stores. It almost felt like Wisconsin. There were even a few curves as I got closer to Montgomery. I’m told the road gets even better past that city. I’ll save that experience for another time.

I arrived at Phil’s a few minutes before 7 and parked. I didn’t see any other bikes, but recognized a few faces in the window from Tuesday night. I came in and had a thoroughly enjoyable dinner with the crowd. I especially enjoyed talking to a few women, one of whom had her own motorcycles and the other wanted one but was dealing with the objections of her husband (also present).

The food was excellent. I had the Santa Fe Chicken, a marinated breast with grilled onions, mushrooms, and cheese on top. The Caesar salad was also good. Highly recommended. The raw peanuts in baskets on the table were a nice touch too.

It was 8:30 when I started to gear up. I’d decided to head for I45 instead of taking back roads home, so I was fiddling with my GPS when another attendee offered to let me follow him to the interstate. I gladly accepted and was safely home within an hour and a half.

I’ll definitely be going to more of these meets. They’re relatively far away from Cypress, but I really liked the people.

My sister Amy arrives tomorrow for Spring Break. It sounds like she wants to attend a rodeo on Saturday. We'll see how that goes. I'm hoping it doesn't rain this weekend so I can get out and sample some local roads. And actually have some pictures to post instead of these mini-novels.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Becca,

It was a pleasure meeting you and I'm glad we were able to assist in your ride home. I bet after your first experience with a Texas lawman that you were happy the trooper passed you by last night. :-)

Yes, the roads get better as you go north past 105. The areas to the north and west of where we ate last night are very enjoyable.