This final set of photos from the bike tour through Houston were especially fun to take, for this country boy baseball fan, as i have here some pics from the Skyliner District and Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros. It was like a boy who’d fallen into a pile of gargantuan toys.
Hope you enjoy them even half as much as i enjoyed taking them.
This set includes a bit around Rice University & Downtown, with a good bit of them from Daniel Boone Bicycles, Hoiston’s oldest, and probably most eccentric, bike shop.
This set contains yet more from the cool Art Car Museum and a few from a really cool bike shop, The Urban Bicycle Gallery.
Most of these are from the very cool Downtown Houston Art Car Museum, kind of odd for abike tour site i guess. But the cars are cool though, as are the folks running the place.
This 2nd rollout of Houston photos includes some from the cool little amazing “Beer Can House” made by working-class hands over course of years in Downtown Houston neighborhood. Also included are pics from the hip Houston neighborhood of Montrose, a pretty little place.
Hi,
It’s been ages since the last post i know, been pretty kicked by this tour, lots of work to bicycle ~2700 miles.
Wanted to at least get some Houston photos on the site when i had a bit of a chance, stories from Houston asap…here goes!:
Here are some videos touching upon some experiences during my trip from Shepherd-Beaumont TX & in Beaumont/Groves itself.
Featured are my Uncle Pete, my nephews Matt & Mark & video from Sam Houston National Forest, Nueces River & the lovely Big Thicket National Preserve. Would’ve loved to visit the Babe Didrikson museum honoring the Beaumont native who was a famed all-around athlete from the early 20th century.
Also would’ve liked to seen some Janis Joplin stuff in nearby Port Arthur, but alas, not in the cards this time.
Hope you enjoy, and please support our efforts as you feel you can, right thru this very website.
Thank you.
http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=0C0Xcw52i7E
January 5: This day was a mostly very pleasant ride through lots of natural beauty: Nueces River, in Sam Houston National Forest & Big Thicket National Preserve, on a very pretty day.
Also met some very kindly local folks along the way, such as a gentleman around Dolen who helped me to get a good route going toward Beaumont, and a group of folks who ran a church-food pantry type place between Dolen & Sour Lake, who took great interest in my trip.
The headwinds & hills were fairly subdued throughout. Something especially about Big Thicket really charmed my soul. Unfortunately, the trail through it stopped midway toward the highway that Google Maps said it’d lead to.
Needless to say the 3 miles of backtracking caused a tight schedule to be even tighter, so much so that my sister very graciously picked me up about halfway between Sour Lake & Beaumont so that i could be on time for my nephew’s jr. high basketball tourney game, a tourney i’d watch all week, about 3 games-worth, which was really cool (they won the whole tourney!)
BEAUMONT
I rode a tiny bit around Beaumont on Jan. 6 (about 5 mi.), making note of some bike lanes that they had rolling thru the middle of downtown.
I spent some time at Logon Cafe, a large, established computer store/cafe/bar/music venue on the outskirts of downtown, waiting out some rain, getting tour homework done, talking with the very cool owner/founder of the place, who happened to have my pal Gina Forsyth’s album “You Are Here” (Gina’s the Folk Queen of New Orleans) on the wall as part of his venue decor. Turns out Gina’s played there a few times over the years.
Later, surprised my Uncle Pete with a visit at his Downtown Beaumont office. I hadn’t seen him in quite a few years.
Finally, had a nice time seeing my nephews Matt (who i got to see during his jr. high team’s weekend basketball tourney victory) & Mark (brilliant little writer), my sis Debbie who helped me much with bike transport issues), her hubby George, and my Mom, who took me in for those few days that weekend.
My mom dropped me off in Downtown Beaumont on January 8, where i would start my journey to Houston, on the way to about equalling my personal record i’d only set on Jan. 2 for biking mileage in a day (~95 miles).
Was a nice little weekend mostly off the bike, as i mostly biked just 5 miles, in Beaumont, that weekend.
Was a rare visit to family, which was also cool, all thanks to the opportunity to take this amazing, fulfilling trip.
January 4th was a nice respite from the rather difficult physicality of the previous days’ rides, which contained lots of miles, headwinds & hills.
This day was one of subdued headwinds, even tiny tailwinds at times, and the route even became more serene & beautiful as it went along, as the road went straight through the middle of Sam Houston National Forest & other various natural & rural landscape scenes filled with big trees & big farms. On top of everything else, the route of this day was substantially less mileage, as it was only about 45 miles for the day.
The Shepherd TX destination for Jan. 4 was established suddenly & almost without warning, thanks to the quick-minded, considerate actions of my host Mary in Huntsville, who’d remembered that she had a friend in the vicinity of where i was trying to go. I wasn’t really sure where I’d stay that night until she made that call and set it up, right after she met me, just moments beforehand.
I started the morning by thanking Mary & saying bye, then settled down to eat a bit and breathe wasy before hitting the road, rolling around Sam Houston State University just blocks from Mary’s house & eating at a nearby student district diner.
When i pulled into Shepherd, i could instantly tell that her friend Brian, the host she’d put me in touch with, was a very cool, hip guy. He lived right on the little highway that turned into Shepherd’s main street into town, pretty close to City Hall.
Brian’s a teacher & former cell tower worker who wears many coaching & teaching hats for a local school, and has an amazingly affordable, big place, in which he has his and others’ very cool art, musical instruments throughout.
He sort of likes the peace & obscurity of the tiny town, but he does get a little bored as the town has almost zero entertainment to offer.
We had an awesome night of talking about society, music (he excitedly wrote down lots of musicians that i was letting him know about, from La. & elsewhere), art, etc. it was really cool to have cone across such a groovy dude in such a small town, the angels were watching me on this one. I think he liked having a like-minded person visit for a while.
Right before we were about to fade out for the night, i had the honor of posing for a “mugshot”, as he’d had a series of visitors & friends photographed for an art project that he had started on the wall, in which we participants held a sign in front of us, indicating a “crime” that we ourselves said that we were guilty of…for my crime sign, i think i wrote something like “vagrant bike hobo”.
Between getting to experience a much more leisurely bike ride of great beauty as well as getting to meet a great new friend at the end of the day, the 6-month anniversary (from 4th of July-4th of January) of having decided to do Bike Tour de Life was very cool indeed.
It was a pleasant, productive day in the end in Huntsville, in large part thanks to my great host.
Huntsville is quite the notorious spot, being the place where Texas executes numerous people, many of them charged with capital offenses that have a flimsy basis of evidence, at best. More enlightenedly, it’s the home of Sam Houston State University.
In general, Huntsville appears to be a quaint enough place (a place highly reliant on the “corrections” industry according to my host, who let me know the state has vast incarceration institutional networks in place there), where the population of roughly 30,000 has a fairly bustling older part of town that seems to manage fairly ok in spite of the garish, corporate entities that linger on the outskirts. I think it’s very safe to say that it’s yet another fairly conservative East Texas town,
My host, along with some of her key close friends, had come from elsewhere and decided to stay in Huntsville after going to SHSU because they liked the relatively mellow small-town vibe, and exist just blocks from SHSU, a typical bohemian enclave geographically just moments away from a big campus (reminds me of the Carlotta neighborhood right off LSU campus long ago, albeit on a much smaller scale).
My host was an obviously caring but strong person, who helped me get my next stop secured south of Huntsville, with her recent boyfriend no less, before i even knew what happened almost. I wasn’t proactive about planning the day after Huntsville, so she very considerately planned it out for me, which was an amazingly kind thing for her to have done, i think.
We ate at a very cool El Salvadoran place that night, and we watched “Into the Wild” at the house at her suggestion, a film which very coincidentally i had been aiming to see, especially in the lead-up to my Huntsville arrival. The film very much spoke to the inherent spirit that i’d been feeling as the tour had just begun.
Weary, adventurous souls actually do have a place of refuge & enlightenment in the middle of Huntsville, which is very nice to consider. I’m personally very grateful for it all.