Out of curiosity, I checked Google Maps for the distance. Could I attach the Franken-stroller and take him that way? But then... something else was on the map. A road I had never seen before. And this road showed a relatively simple connection to A.W. Grimes. If it was real, I had an easy way to avoid the Hwy 79/A.W. Grimes intersection. So, no dog park. (For this, I had to actually say no to Augie. Otherwise, he'd keep insisting I take him.)
I've said in the past that N. Georgetown is a major connection from one side of Round Rock to the other. So here I was again, riding down that street. I hadn't ridden down E. Main Street in a long time. There was the old baseball park (I think it's going to be torn down. I'll have to check on this.), the old folks' home, and the pink house and the tomatillo green house with accordian music in the air. Then my new route began:
If you take Main Street to the very end, well, the road ends. There is a small road to the right, and in the past, it was just a hump over the railroad tracks and it became a dirt road into some fields. The hump is still there, but the fields are now a huge condo/apartment complex. I had to walk my bike over the tracks because there wasn't any road there.
The rest was just a ride through the parking lot, a ride on the sidewalk along A.W. Grimes, and a ride to Cedar Ridge High School. That's where I'm going to work next year -- Imma bee a high school teacher next year.
Because I don't know the roads on that side of Round Rock/Pflugerville, I decided to look for an alternate route back. Maybe there was something that avoided Gattis -- a really dangerous road for bikes. I rode into a neighborhood directly across the high school and I asked a guy who was raking his yard if there was a back road.
"Oh, yeah. Just take Apache and turn left at the T and then turn right. And then you'll turn left and right and you should be right around there." Easy, right! I took off and didn't bother to ask him where I was going to end up. I eventually ended up in front of a field again. Off in the distance, I could see A.W. Grimes and it was pretty close to where I had been when I coming this way. I didn't cut through it, though; I went around the field, skirting along the edge that had been mowed, but it was hard work. In front of my tire, I could just make out the faintest trail. Someone else had done this, too. It was all mowed weeds crunching underneath and the tires would sink and sometimes slip a little. I was in my granny gear and took my time. It wore me out and when I got to the road the incline was steep. I sat back on my rear tire but the weeds were too slick. I only made it two-thirds of the way and had to walk up the rest. Still, it was a victory!
And you know what, once I got on A.W., I didn't feel like going back the same way. I followed the sidewalk all the way down to Hwy 79, but I was on the sidewalk facing traffic, not the side that flowed with it. It didn't make sense to cut across traffic just so I could make a left turn on A.W. onto 79 -- which is just crazy. (I'll have to do that some other time.)
No, what I did was I looked for a goat trail. That's what people who walk along the roads create. Kids on bikes, too. These are the people you see that seem to be walking through the weeds and grass on the side of the highway. They beat down a good path, so instead of traversing the roads, I took back to the trails. At some point I cut across 79 -- I felt like a kid who was hunkered down on his bike and sprinting across the highway even though there was no traffic when I did it. I pedaled easy all the way home.
Here's a slide show of my little adventure. I'm going to have to learn how to use my camera in bright light. Too many shots were overexposed and I just couldn't tweak them enough to use them.
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