ABCD - Will You Take Part?

Maybe you would like to join in with this.....

A Bloggers Centerline Day, or ABCD, will take place on Sunday 1st May 2011.

The plan is to inspire as many bloggers as possible to go outside and take a photograph of themselves on this day, wherever they are in the world. The photo can be creative, arty, contain more than one person, be in any type of location and can contain anything else you like. It must however contain the centerline of a road and at least part of you, the blogger.

There are 5 rules....

Rule 1 - the picture must be taken on 1st May 2011.

Rule 2 - the picture must be of yourself, and you must be a person that publishes a blog. You can include whatever else you like in the picture, including other people if you wish.

Rule 3 - the picture must include the centerline of a road.

Rule 4 – you should publish the picture on your blog on 1st May 2011, along with a few words about the picture and why you chose that location or pose.

Rule 5 - when you have posted the picture on your own blog, put a comment on http://garysusatour.blogspot.com/2011/04/abcd-will-you-take-part.html and include in that comment the address of your own blog post containing your own picture. 

Gary France will then pick his favourite photos and publish these as being the winners. There will be a prize of $100 awarded to the overall single winner, as chosen by Gary.

In order to get this event known as widely as possible, please copy and paste this posting onto your own blog, including the title. Please do that today!

As a reminder to yourself to take the photo and post it, put an entry into your diary for 1st May 2011.

Let’s see if we can get as any people to join in as possible.

If You Ride Long Enough!

They say if you ride long enough on two wheels you will some day hit the dirt wrong side out, or something like that. In other words you're going to loose it and dump the bike. If you're lucky you will be the only one involved and luckier still you might just be able to get up and walk away from it.
Like a lot of folks I've talked to the last few years I started riding again after about thirty years or so. About the time I was looking at age 55 coming up in just a couple of months. It was all pretty innocent really. One of the guys at church one day said some of us should get motorcycles and start a riding club. Several people we knew had bikes and was members of some club or other. Here I was with no real hobbies and not much else to spend my time on other than work. All the boys had moved out and started families of their own. So why not. Come to find out after a few weeks guess who was the only one that went out and bought them a motorcycle?

2007 Stratoliner 1900

I bought my first motorcycle, a Honda 350, some time around 1973. It was a used bike but ran great and I really enjoyed riding it. I lived in Bryan Texas at the time and I put a lot of miles on that bike around the central Texas area. I had several friends that rode as well but my brother had a Honda 750. That was the bike to have at the time. He let me ride it a few times and that motorcycle had some get up and go.
When you're young and not so smart you sometimes make wrong decisions. Like deciding to take a night ride after you just spent the last three hours or so in a nightclub. Some of the guys wanted to take a ride, so for some reason I chose to go along with them. I lived on the west side of town and had to go by the house to pickup something. I have no idea what that was but it was sure the wrong thing to do.

On my trip from the house to meet up with everyone else I took a road that would eventually dead end, turn right and them make an immediate left over some railroad tracks and continue on. When you ride this road at night with the street lights helping to line the way for you it's a little surprising how it makes the road seem to just continue on straight ahead.

Now I remember thinking "this road comes to an end somewhere about ......oops!"

I hit the side of the ditch head-on, flipped over and sideways in the air and landed going backwards on my side, still on the bike in the rock and gravel that goes along with a set of railroad tracks. When I separated from the motorcycle it ended up laying between the rails of the tracks. Fortunately I was wearing my helmet which had a bubble sheild on it. When I hit the ditch my helmet hit the handle bar and split the sheild and bent the bars down and forward. When I hit the gravel on my right side it tore a hole in my leg muscle that I still have today.

I was very lucky on that day. I was able to pick the bike up and move it off the railroad tracks. I then proceeded to walk about two miles to a friends house for some help. They took me to the emergency room where they doctored up my nose and let me go. I spent the next ten days or so hobbling around and letting all the road rash heal up.

1971 Honda 350

This is not the bike but it'll give you some idea what it would look like.

Fall Ride to the Hill Country Part 2

I met Julian at his place in Mesquite and we mapped out a route for our trip to Canyon Lake. He has a Time Share at the Hill Country Resort off FM 306 on the east side of Canyon Lake. We chose to take a cross country route and stay off the interstate as much as possible. So we headed east then down through Kaufman, over to Ennis, south to Highway 14 and down through Mexia. We made a short stop in Calvert for some good ole DQ ice cream and did touring circle of Old Town Calvert. Rode by the place I grew up, the old school, up by the Calvert Cemetery then turned left to go by the old big Mansion Homes that are around the southeast side of town.

Calvert Tour of Homes is scheduled every spring where you can do a walk thru of several of these great old homes. As I was growing up in Calvert I was given the opportunity to see some of these before they were fixed up as a show place. Many people have lived in these homes through the years and a lot of work has gone into these homes to keep them presentable. Many of the details of how they were first constructed are still visible as most of the work was focused on keeping to the original designs.
As we rode on heading in a southeast direction we enjoyed seeing some of the good farm country Texas has to offer. With not too many eye catching experiences on our trip we ended checking in around sundown.

A pleasant ride even though the wind was pushing a little at twenty or so.
After a little walk down the street for our breakfast our first choice of rides was The River Road out of Sattler, just south of the lake. It runs about eleven miles crossing the Comal River about four times as it switches back and forth through the trees and past many places to rent cabins and or canoes if you wanted to spend some time on the water. We made a stop about halfway down and I took out my camera to see what I could get a descent picture of. I’ll find out how to post pictures and try to include a few along the way.

This was on a Tuesday so the traffic wasn’t what it would be during a weekend or during the heat of the summer. The last time I rode this route, as I was about to the end I came upon a place in the river that was full of tubes, rafts, canoes, anything that would float. Apparently the local college crowd was having a beer party on the river. There must have been two thousand people out there.
We made a little stop at the local Harley dealership so I could dream about my next bike and Julian could glance through the shirt clearance rack. He likes to add to his shirt collection when he can.
Afterward we decided to take a trip up to Willow City, run the Willow City Loop and stop by the hunting lease my brothers and I have. After a cutting across to tie into Hwy 290 off and up to FM 1323 we ran into a little car chase. Just after I turned onto 290, after checking that I had plenty of room I was quite surprised to be passed by a car at a pretty high rate of speed. Just as it passed me I saw the back window open and a 32” flat screen TV come flying out. Both myself and the car coming from the other direction had to swerve and pull over to keep from being hit by it. That thing flew up into the air for twenty feet before it landed on the pavement and slide over to the side of the road. Then as I made my turn and pulled over three police cars came barreling past us with lights and sirens blasting away. Julian called the Johnson City police and they said they had them in their sights. Blanco county has had a string of burglaries the last few months and they think these were the ones responsible.

The rest of the trip through the loop and into the lease gave plenty of chances to see the local deer population. They were plenty of deer out, the most I’ve seen in a while on one trip. As we headed back the temperature started going down so we put on our extra shirt and jacket and made our way back keeping an eye on all the little green eyes you see on the side of the road after dark. Talk about raising your awareness levels!

The next morning as we headed into New Braunsfels to find a different place for breakfast we spotted another deer crossing the main four lane road going into town. I was surprise to see he made it across. Although he had a good rack you could tell it was a young deer. We finally found a little place off the beaten path called Martina’s Café. They had pretty good breakfast tacos even though it was almost eleven o’clock.

It was a pretty good four days of riding and laying around and soaking in the hot tub.


The Canyon Lake Dam