When I was a child visiting my grandmother in the country one of my favorite pastimes was watching the traffic drive by on US40. I would imagine where and what the people would be doing. Trucks intrigued me with the various names on trailers or the exposed loads. Now this was back in the 50’s and US40 recently expanded from two lanes to four and the traffic probably was a couple hundred feet from the glider swing on the front porch but I spent many an hour watching.
Today while stopped at the Chevron station in Huffman I briefly regressed to that time on my grandmother’s front porch and wondered what I would see if I sat in a lawn chair under the fuel island canopy. The first obstacle would be getting permission but it would be fun in my dream. Just the short time I stop I notice many people and other things. The train racing past on the tracks along FM1960 provides many sights with the graffiti on the cars.
I didn’t spend too much time people watching today but I did ride my newer southerly route through Atascocita, Walden on Lake Houston and then on to Huffman before turning back to home. School is out and the traffic around them dropped off. The 31.89 mile route took 2:02:54 to cover with the stopped time of 30:34, mostly at the Huffman Chevron station watching the traffic and people. I had a good average speed of 15.6 mph with 25.1 mph my max speed and average cadence of 80.5 RPM. My first 5 mile section did not generate a big deficit time to overcome later at 20:41 leaving only about 42 seconds to make up. By the 7th mile I recovered the 42 seconds and started to build my average speed up into the 15.x mph territory. This table shows my average speed for each 5 mile section. Only the first and last sections fall below 15.0 mph.
One of the things I enjoy about this route is the lack of dogs running loose. I hear dogs barking behind fences and they probably could be threatening if they got free but my “friend” the fence intervenes.
June mileage is now at 105.98 and YTD is 2896.36.
