Day 32 - Centerville to Mexia - Two Far 2021 - Sooo... Far

May 10, 2021

Day 32 - Centerville to Mexia

Damp and chilly

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Rain was expected by mid afternoon, so we got on the road a little after 9:00 It was damp and misty, but no rain was falling. That would be our conditions for the whole ride today. For Floridians, it was also a little chilly. The temperature was in the upper 60's, but with the dampness and complete absence of sunshine, it was cool.

Climbing hills is a good way to warm up and that necessity presented itself to us many times today. We didn't have any steep hills, but a lot of 5% grades. On a loaded recumbent tandem, even 5% is work! Our total ascent today worked out to about 40ft/mile, spread out pretty evenly along the route.

It was so grey today, it was nice to have something colorful to see. These, I know thanks to Bill, are Indian Blanket. We saw masses of these along the road for miles.

We have passed many ranches with entry gates leading to long sweeping drives.

A serene morning view on the Alazon Ranch.

Image not found :( — Another Texas pasture view

And, of course, some cows just taking it easy this morning.

We don't see many ramshackle, abandoned buildings in the countryside here. I captured this one today.

Kerry here..

At Dew, TX we left TX75 and picked up TX179 and 2 things happened. The first thing we noticed is that the hills were in the 2-3 pct. range (vs 5-6 pct. on 75) and we started seeing lots of oil wells and oil services yards. If you switch the map at the top of the page to satellite view, you will notice all the white squares. Each square is an oil well pad.

We passed several yards like this that were full of drill pipe and related equipment.

This appeared to be a compressor station for a natural gas pipeline

Back to Jeanna...

Our original route for today only went though one town with services. We re-routed last night to go through three towns. It didn't add any distance, but it did add 400 feet of climbing. We decided it was worth it to have places to stop. None of the three of the towns looked prosperous at all. These pictures were taken in the third town, Teague.

Old bank building, now a library. It is an interesting building.

Teague has a large railyard. A guy controlling traffic in a work zone near the tracks said this yard was a major place for forming trains.

We passed the first fruit farm we've noticed since we've been in Texas. There were acres of peach trees and also some plum trees.

Tomorrow is likely to be a washout, with thunderstorms expected all day. We'll decide what we're doing after we see the weather forecast in the morning.

Today's ride: 52 miles (84 km)
Total: 1,410 miles (2,269 km)

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