Today’s ride was planned kinda last minute. We’d thought about doing a ride out of Blanco that mimicked yesterday’s Real Ale ride but it wasn’t in the cards today. So Jim and I ended up going for an old familar favorite out of Liberty Hill. The route picture at the right shows today’s 36 mile loop. Click here for the details.

This is always a scenic ride and traffic is usually pretty limited on all the roads. I like doing it counter clockwise because it’s more scenic on the south side of the loop as you finish up. You’ve got to cross hwy 29 a couple times – once in Liberty Hill and then again later in Bertram – and that traffic was pretty high today, but thankfully we didn’t actually have to ride along hwy 29.

Central Texas is still surprisingly green and the temps are surprisingly moderate compared to what we’ve come to expect for late May. Usually by now it’s getting just plain hot. But with some cloud cover and a light breeze, it was down right pleasant out there this morning.

Despite low traffic on the roads, a ride out this way doesn’t seem to be complete without a few knucklehead drivers to give you grief. Today was no exception. Early in the ride a cretin in a black pickup floored it and blew by us at full throttle. He was easily going 80+ by the time he blew by us. Why? who knows. We were single file on a rolling country road. The road is probably unsafe at 60 mph. A complete pinhead.

Later in the ride, a black SUV gave a quick swerve toward us on a straight wide section as we headed back to Liberty Hill. More friendly hill country cedar choppers thinking it’s fun to put the fear of God in us I guess. Where does this kind of thing come from? I can’t explain it. Yeah sure, there’s probably a few bad apple cyclists that at some point have been hogging the road out there and made them slow down a second or two but it’s still uncalled for. It’s unfortunate some cyclists feel entitled to take the whole road at times but there’s got to be something more to it than that.

Anyway, it was otherwise a good ride. I had to stop and take a picture of a favorite windmill scene I’ve ridden by many times over the years but have just never taken a photo. Today the cows, colors and windmill made for a good shot and I snapped this one. I took it with the iphone camera and it still came out pretty good I think.