Yesterday was interesting. It was our first day back on the bike after a long hiatus, and our first full day of loaded biking in Texas. The wind was shockingly strong, and slowed us down significantly. Before leaving Austin, we switched back to our bike’s original cassette and derailleur. That change made our bike shift much better, but it also means we lost a lot of low gears. With our current set of gears and full touring load, even small hills are challenging; when you throw wind into the mix, things get even tougher. Forgetting that Texas sun is considerably more potent than pacific northwest sun, we had been a bit careless with the sunscreen. We rolled in to camp exhausted and sunburned.
When we arrived, our friend and host from Austin, Minda, was already here. She had driven out to hang out with us for our first evening back on the road. She brought us gatorade and cookies, which was a lovely treat.
We staked out a campsite, and headed for the showers while Minda drove to town and picked up burgers and milkshakes for all three of us at a local roadhouse. We thoroughly enjoyed our burgers, and bid Minda a fond farewell.
After she left, we set up the tent and headed to bed in short order. We enjoyed listening to music with our new speaker (an x-mini from thinkgeek) for a bit while we looked at potential routes for the next few days.
I experimented with several android mapping tools, hoping to find a map application that uses OpenStreetMap data in offline mode, and lets us display a route from a GPX file on top. We ride with our phones in airplane mode to conserve battery power, but Google maps forgets its map tiles, forcing us to turn the Internet connection back on. I found several open street map tools, but haven’t yet found the right set of steps to display a route on top of any of them. My favorite offline map tool is NavDroyd, but it appears to have no way of adding a layer from an external source.
Today has been even windier than yesterday. Were we to have ridden today, it would have been a really difficult ride. Luckily, after our tough first day yesterday, we decided to take today as a rest day. We have been enjoying Bastrop State Park, and generally making a nuisance of ourselves (earlier we got in trouble for sitting on a bench inside a “construction zone”) . Tomorrow, we plan to stay with a warm showers host near the town of Carmine, we’ll be staying there with Marti and Dave, a very cool couple from Milwaukee that we’re camping with tonight.
Comments
Glad to see you are back on the road? What’s the update on your planned schedule? Still headed to FL and stopping there for a bit, or powering on up the east coast?
Yep, back at it. The current revised plan is to bike to the east coast and head north along it. We’ll probably linger on the coast until we tire of it, and then head west again. We’re not sure we’ll have time to bike the entire northern tier, but neither of us would be heartbroken if we miss some of it. We’d likely do a craigslist rideshare, or rent a car if we found ourselves behind schedule.