Two Days with Kenny

So I have some vacation days left this year and I don’t want to leave any of them on the table. Besides Pastor Tan, our associate pastor, is a much better preacher than I am and I thought it would be good to give the congregation a break and take a Sunday off before the Christmas season starts. So I planned to spend some time riding and camping.

But then my good friend Kenny called me on Wednesday and asked me if I wanted to go on a ride on Saturday. My plans changed immediately (you gotta love vacation days) so I invited him to join me for a couple of days of riding. Our plan was to leave on Friday morning at 10:00 AM and be back Saturday before dark.

I took a couple of minutes to plan the ride and immediately got antsy for Friday morning to arrive. I got to Kenny’s at 9:56 AM and we left at 10:15 AM. That pretty much sums up how things go with Kenny and I. I’m always in a hurry and Kenny…isn’t. The forecast called for rain showers throughout the day but we were ready to go and we did.

Kenny led us out of town toward Bellville, TX. We are always in a hurry to leave Houston and taking the back roads helps that process along. Today was going to be all about meandering so we meandered through La Grange and then headed south.

I love the road south of I-10. Ranch country. Country roads. Not much traffic and, where there is, it is fun to gun it a little and pass cars the old fashioned way. We spent a few meandering hours until we picked up TX 173 outside of Jourdanton to ride into Hondo. We had a little surprise as the shortcut that the GPS sent us down was gravel for a few miles. I loved it.

We spent the night at the Hondo Best Western. I am a Best Western guy. It is the only chain I stay at when I have a choice and I wasn’t disappointed. The clerk sent us to a little place in town for Mexican food. I went to sleep early. I assume Kenny wasn’t long to follow.

On Saturday morning we got up early to see a cloudy, gloomy kind of day in front of us. The good thing is that it wasn’t supposed to rain. The bad thing is that it was a cloudy, gloomy, kind of day. I was excited about where we would be riding. You have to go a long way from Houston to get there but it is worth it.

We headed out of Hondo on US 90 to Sabinal where we picked up TX 127 to US 83 at Concan. These are beautiful roads, especially US 83 and it passes into and along the Frio River Canyon. We went north on US 83 to Leakey for a quick coffee stop. That was fun so we went back the way we came down to the turn to TX 1050 near the entrance to Garner State Park.

We took TX 1050 over to Utopia. Beautiful road, curves, hills, views, awesome. In Utopia we caught TX 187 north and then took a right on RR 337, one of the famous Texas Three Twisted Sisters. We’ve both ridden all of them before and we only had so much time so RR 337 would be it. We rode to Medina then south on TX 16 to Bandera. Slowwwwly behind a chain of cars headed up by an RV.

A coffee stop in Bandera and then we made our way down to Caliente Harley Davidson in San Antonio. This is one of my favorite Harley shops. It is also, given the constant road construction in San Antonio, one of the hardest to get to. I was hoping for some Black Friday deals but we didn’t see much. Off we went to find our way home.

We were worried a bit about holiday traffic on I-10 but boy were we surprised. It was busy, race track busy. From San Antonio to Columbus we were keeping up with traffic between 80-90 mph. That ended so we started looking for some back roads out of Columbus. After I took us in search of wild geese, never finding the road I was looking for, we headed back to I-10 and followed the traffic until it ended near Sealy. We got off the interstate and did some more meandering, including riding the curves from San Felipe to Pattison, as we made our way home.

Mission accomplished. Two days of riding and Kenny was safely at home before dark.