This ride starts at the Crowley High School, goes south on small roads through Cleburne, through Rio Vista, to just west of Covington, then turns northeast and goes through Covington, then north to Grandview, and down small roads, staying just west of I-35W, back to Crowley.

I really like this route. Most of the roads are small, low traffic, country roads. Many of the roads are tree lined, and very scenic. Even the stretches of highways are pretty low traffic roads. There are hills, but nothing really steep, and none are really long hills, either.

Greg joined me on this ride, and we both decided at the beginning to keep the pace reasonable, on not spend this whole ride hammering. And so we did. I finished this ride feeling better than I ever have after a century.

It was 63 degrees with a stiff south breeze when we started at 8:00 am. It actually felt a bit cold until we got underway. It was just a few miles down the road that a few bikes took off ahead of everyone else. Greg and I, both needing to make an unscheduled pit stop anyway, resisted the urge to join this group, and just stayed with the main group. When the 58 milers turned off in Cleburne, there were just six bikes out of the main group headed on for the century: two road bikes, two tandems, and two recumbents.

We kept a comfortable pace for the most part, but the south wind got pretty tough until we turned northeast near Covington. From there on, it was easy sailing, and I do mean sailing. It was a fun, spirited group. The tandems were experts at spotting the city limit signs first, and won all the city limit sign sprints (although Greg did claim the cemetery sign sprint). We also took our time at the stops, and didn’t finish the ride until after 3:00 pm. I ended up with 98.3 miles, with 2967 feet of climbing, an on the bike time of 6:05, for a 16.0 mph average.

My usual winter route roads south of home have gotten very torn up from the oilfield truck traffic. I do enjoy roads without terrible hills for my winter rides on the Nimbus. I’m planning on incorporating some of the roads from this route into some winter routes for myself for this year.