Around The Bend: The Pressure

The pressure, OH the pressure. We went “Nationwide” with distribution on news stands in all 50 states and Canada!

Boy Howdee! Happy days and that entire hullabaloo. But once I finished dancing around to the Z-Z Top lyrics “…We was laughing and I’m jokin’ and we feelin’ alright. Oh I’m bad, I’m nationwide. Yes I’m bad, I’m nationwide” I stop and suddenly realized “Hey, I probably have to be more creative in my writing.” Where’s the fun?

So I sat back to analyze my options for this story and decided the only real way to get a great idea is to get on the bike and ride. Surely a trip would bring forth a great story. And it is SPRING in Texas. The wild flowers are blooming and the humidity is held at bay (a little). In Texas, the weather is practically perfect at this time of year. What a better narrative to fill my word quota for this piece, I ask you?

After weeks of enduring a cast on a broken foot, I was certainly overdue for a little bike time and it wasn’t hard to persuade a few others to buy a ticket to my idea. So we made plans to meet up on Friday, not too early because well, because we wanted to miss the early morning traffic (ok, I wanted to sleep in).

I am sure you know that Texas is big. You can pick out some places IN Texas and they are still bigger than several other states combined. We have parks bigger than some states. We have beaches, deserts, plains, places where is snows, forests, mountains, just about everything. But since this is a weekend ride, we decided we would head to the mountains.

Ok, you may not think of the hills of the Austin area as “mountains” but they have to do for the area we are in and they have some great riding and camping. So we went to all the places you have been or maybe haven’t but I bet you wish you could. Friday afternoon we stopped in on 6th street just for a quick walk on the boulevard. We planned to stay outside the city and didn’t want to be traveling in Deer County too late at night so we went on heading towards our first camping site. The night was clear, the weather unbelievable and we sang those old familiar songs late into the night. I am sure you know them, Gilligan’s Island, The Addams Family, Beverly Hillbillies, I Love Lucy (one of the riders was a bit older than the rest of us), and Green Acres (we couldn’t remember the words to The Partridge Family). Ah, the memories.

We hope that you enjoyed reading this excerpt from "The Pressure". If you would like to read the entire article and more, you can order a back issue of May / Jun 2006 where this article was originally published.

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