Lake Mineral Wells Trailway

With the news of cooler weather over the weekend Michele and I loaded up the camping trailer and headed off to Mineral Wells State Park for the weekend. While there we off course rode the 20 mile (one way) trailway which is the bed of the old railroad that served Mineral Wells in its days as a big player in the mineral water business. Riding from our campsite to the trail head and both ends of the Trail and back was about 45 miles for us, also all of the roads in the park were new ashpalt, none of that chip seal stuff, very nice.This trailway is in good conditioning and is a great ride, no steep hills or descents, just slight grades and smooth crushed and screened limestone. It does cross several small country roads and there is a trail bridge over highway 180 near Mineral Wells. At the Weatherford end there is only a parking lot, around halfway in the Town of Garner is a country store, but it is closed on Sunday.

After the bridge is a memorial park with several exhibits and this helicopter, it seems that a lot of the State Park land was used to train helicopter pilots for the military, before it was a park.

We saw few riders on our ride, maybe 5 bikes, 5 hikers and 1 horse along with a few deer and a good number of birds. I got this deer picture from the bicycle.

The camping at the State Park is also nice and there is a nice sized lake I caught a few bass out of. The mountain bike trails in the park are very hard since they are mostly shared with horses that turn the soil into soft sand.

Dennis

Peach Pedal Bicycle Rally

Ive wanted to do the Peach Pedal Rally for a while, last year I was going and then my back went out so I couldn't ride. This year the temperature was predicted to be 104 or 105, but we decided to go anyway since the start time is 7:30 am. We loaded up the tandem and headed for Weatherford and the Outback Building at the new high school.

The tandem in the mini van

Michele and I rode our Treck Tandem 64 miles in about 3.5 hours with 2 quick rest stops, this was a nice rally with back roads and decent rest stops and they had a good turnout I would guess was several thousand riders.

Since it is the peach festival I had homemade peach ice cream and cobbler made with Parker County peaches. Michele passed on the cobbler and had other festival food but she did not pass up the homemade ice cream.

I was washing the Tandem after the ride and noticed a blister forming on the rear tire and that spot was worn very thin, it's unsafe to ride now so I will get a new tire, we were very lucky we didn't have a blowout on a high speed downhill. Our top speed was 38 miles an hour and we averaged over 18 mph for the ride.

No sailing due to the extreme heat we have had, I have a chance to go on a 9 day coastal sailing trip on the 17th, but with work that's not going to happen and it would be hot sleeping on the boat on the south Texas coast.

Dennis