Dale Robertson’s Cycling Notebook in today’s Houston Chronicle tells how Shaun Taylor moved from Calgary, Alberta, where he was into moutain bike racing to Houston. The change meant leaving what he thought was the perfect MTB location and then landing in Houston with no mountains except for the highway overpasses. Once here though he learned about the Texas mountain bike race series.

An excerpt, “Shaun Taylor had come to love endurance racing on his mountain bike with an unabashed, unapologetic passion. And living in Calgary, Alberta, he had the Rocky Mountains for a playground.

Then a seemingly terrible thing happened. His wife, Doreen, a projects manager for Fluor, was transferred to Houston for a long-term special assignment. Taylor didn’t know much about the upper Texas coast, but he wasn’t going to have to do much Googling to figure out that we were pretty bereft of mountains here.”