I enjoyed the 70 mile version of this ride last month, but the 100 mile route is more challenging than I care to tackle again. I thought I had ridden all the roads inside the triangle of Venus, Maypearl, and Waxahachie, but plainly, I hadn’t. And this ride seemed to pick the roughest and toughest roads in that area, coming back from Waxahachie.

The other problem area was also unexpected. Going west, we crossed FM157 south of Venus on FM2258, which is further south than any of the rides I’ve done in this area, then went to turn north on CR206, to head to Alvarado. But CR206 was gravel for as far as the eye could see. Not just plain gravel, either, it was deep and perfectly smooth gravel, like it was going to be new chipseal as soon as they poured the tar on. It was so smooth, it looked almost like pavement, and obviously fooled Ray, as he turned too fast onto it and went down hard when his rear wheel slid out from under him. Greg and I were behind him, and it was a very scary looking fall to us.

But, Ray got up and rode strong the rest of the ride. I hope no serious injuries show up from it tomorrow. I think it’s another reminder that one of the nicest things about a lwb is that when you fall, you don’t fall far. Not knowing how far this gravel might go, we ended up taking a detour which added 1 or 2 miles to our ride, but kept us on good, low traffic roads.

In spite of how fast we took off (I still had over a 19 mph average at the first stop in Venus, 25 miles into the ride), the problem roads ended up slowing us down a lot, and I only finished with a 16.5 mph average. Total mileage was 100.9. Just as I suspected it would, the 100 mile route had a LOT more climbing than the 70 mile route. My Garmin had shown less than 1100 feet of climbing on the 70 mile route, but 3264 feet of climbing on the 100 mile route. That’s still not a lot of climbing for a 100 mile route, but it does have some tough, steep, albeit short hills.

It was great meeting Thomas and Cookie. Doing a shorter route than us, they were long gone by the time we got in, so I’d like to see a ride report here from them. There was also a tandem recumbent there (I can’t remember y’alls names, so if you read these reports, refresh my memory), so there was a total of 7 recumbents on this ride. That has to be some kind of record for an FWBA ride; I’m often the only one.

Riding with Steve, Greg, and Ray is about as fun as it gets, and the weather was really great, but we need to pick a little better route next time.