Backroads touring at 35 m.p.h.
So Friday night about 6:30 pm, I hopped on my scooter, gassed it up and headed out to New Braunfels. I can’t take the scooter on the highway, so I road the access road of loop 1604 until I got to Green Mountain Road. I headed North on that and just sort of kept bearing North as I went. I didn’t have a map, but I could see the lights of Interstate 35 off to my right, so I had an idea of where to head. (I-35 goes directly from San Antonio to New Braunfels, which is where my destination lay.)
By the time I got onto Nacogdoches, it was pitch black. There is a huge cement plant between San Antonio and New Braunfels which is covered with orange lights at night. It was generating a big halo of dust, so I kept looking up and seeing this weird otherworldly glow that helped me orient myself when the highway wasn’t visible. I passed old one-room churches and saw lights glowing from the windows of hidden houses way back in the woods.
Eventually I saw the sign for New Braunfels city limits and stopped at a convenience store for directions to Gruene Hall. I got to the hall, had some supper at a barbecue restauarant next door, and then hooked up with my buddy Cory to listen to The Greencards. They reminded me a lot of Alison Krauss and Union Station, but livelier. (AK&US can get a little mopey sometimes.) It was an excellent show and more than worth the price of admission.
The only thing I didn’t like was that Gruene Hall is not a very big space and it doesn’t provide smoking/non-smoking areas. I’ve still got a bit of a cold and the cigarette smoke was really bugging me.
After the show I headed back home along the interstate access roads. That was far less interesting than the trip out, but I just wanted to get home at that point. I had one very unwelcome adrenaline spike when some idiot in a white SUV pulled out in front of me from the Bluebonnet Palace parking lot and forced me to swerve around them to keep from pasting myself against their side. That adrenaline kept me pumped and alert when I got back inside 1604 and had to figure out how to get back home. For reasons I won’t go into here, I couldn’t follow my path back home from the direction I was coming from, so I had an adventure on the Northeast side of San Antonio as I tried to figure out how to get back to my section of town. That took a little longer than I would have liked, but I did eventually get home. It had dropped to about 40° by that point and my thighs were frozen, so I wrapped myself up in several blankets and thawed out as I went to bed.
And so passed the first midnight ride adventure. I survived this one, so who knows? Maybe I’ll do it again.
February 5th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
So glad you arrived home intact! Going out that late also sets one up for contact with lots of Texas wildlife. Glad you didn’t have any adrenaline rushes from that!
February 6th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
You were frozen at 40 degrees? That’s a heat wave!
Anywho, glad you got where you were going and back.