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By Lynx, on May 17th, 2011 Another GPS goof. We were headed to Port Aransas and had just gone through the small town of Goliad when the Garmin decided we needed to be heading east instead of south like we had been all day. What the heck? I pulled over to zoom out on the map and sure enough it wanted us to go left to the coast and then cut back adding who knows how many miles to our route. Why the heck would I want to go that way? The other road did seem to be the more heavily travelled but we decided to carry on and ignore the GPS once again.
Its fortunate we did because further down the road was a awesome white mission gleaming through the tree line. I unfortunately did not save those pictures before i lost my little camera, they weren’t very good anyway. They wanted you to pay at the road entrance just to get close enough to get a good picture, screw that..
Further on down the road we saw this, WOW! It looked like a weathered old Spanish fort that you’d expect to see in Central or South America, not in Texas. We were not planning on stopping but we took a few pictures and rode around the back wall of the extensive complex and decided we just had to stay and check this out so we were more than happy to pay to go inside. This is the business model that the other mission should adopt.
If you are going this way ignore the GPS and take the road less travelled. Had we blindly paid attention to where the GPS told us to go we would have missed all of this. The Presidio la Bahia is amazing and well worth the stop. We almost had the place to ourselves there was only two other families exploring the big complex with us.
Rather than retell all of the amazing history of this place I’ve added links on all of the pictures with text to the originals so that you may read them better. There is also quite an extensive amount of history available on the Goliad Massacre and the Presidio. It is because of the Alamo and especially the brutal take no prisoners policy of the Mexicans during the Goliad campaign that the rebels rallied for revenge and ultimately won the war.
Everyone has heard of The Alamo but very few have heard of Goliad with a higher death toll than the Alamo and the other battles combined, infact before watching the historical films yesterday I knew nothing about it either. Goliad or Presidio la Bahia, however, is far better in terms of its preservation and authenticity. It is the only complete Presidio in the United States. It may not have the multimedia, flashy exhibits and numerous artifact examples brought in from elsewhere like its more famous cousin but it does have an entire unmolested Spanish Fort.
Here the size of the parade grounds, the walls and all the attached buildings and the church are very impressive. The view you see from the highway of it perched ontop of a hill it looks very imposing with its aged and weathered stone. At the Alamo you have one building and a small section of barracks, the vast majority of the original site is under pavement and store fronts, at Goliad you get the full effect of what the Alamo would have looked like back in it’s day.
Continue reading Goliad, the other Alamo
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By Lynx, on May 16th, 2011 
The San Antonio Riverwalk area is not to be missed. It is a strip of shallow canals lined with awesome restaurants and shops. The atmosphere is great, its shaded and next to the cool water and a great way to escape the sometimes overbearing heat elsewhere in the city. Lets face it, at the height of tourist season San Antonio can be hot, humid and miserable. I never understood why people want to flock there during the summer instead of when its much cooler and pleasant in the spring or fall but if you are one of those people then the Riverwalk area is a nice area to cool off without getting soaked by a killer whale.
Same as the bus tour around the streets above the Riverwalk boat tour is highly recommended first thing. You’ll get to hear much of the history of the Riverwalk, its restaurants and buildings and get to see many views that you cannot by foot. You’ll also get to see the lay of the land which makes trying to find a restaurant you want to try much easier than exploring on foot and trying to decide if you want to eat at this one or see what else is further around the bend.
We had a great time at the riverwalk, everyone was friendly, and courteous and even the ducklings were enjoying themselves. We had such a good time that we decided to come back on our way home during a weekend when it was packed with people. There was a little more bumping then but not too bad. All in all I’d recommend coming here any time of year but during the week is a lot better if you hope to get a table outside or get pictures without 30 strangers in them.
Did I mention that the Riverwalk has a ton of restaurant choices…? Heres a small fraction:
Continue reading San Antonio Riverwalk
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By Lynx, on May 16th, 2011 San Antonio had some awesome double decker tour busses. They are inexpensive and a great way to see the downtown area of the city. Why spend your time looking through fliers and guides to decide where to go and then have to hunt for parking when you can sit back and relax and let someone else do all the work for you.
I highly recommend taking the bus tour first thing some time in the morning. They will show you the sights and explain a lot of the history and oddities of the various locations and allow you to get your bearings and a good feel of the cities layout for you to plan the rest of the day around. The buses also make numerous stops along the way at trendy neighborhoods to do shopping or fine dining as well as the historical stops and tourist locations. You can get off at one stop and explore and get on another bus afterwards using the same ticket.
The full tour is pretty long, I think around an hour or so. My advice, put on some sun screen if you are going to be sitting up top that whole time unless you want to finishthe tour with some badly sunburnt knees like I did.
Of course we had to get pictures of all the interesting San Antonio sights like the giant cowboy with a saddle or the enormous BBQ sauce water tower.
Continue reading Riverwalk Bus Tour
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By Lynx, on May 16th, 2011 With the unexpected setback of SeaWorld being closed what else were we to in San Antonio with no planning… The Alamo!
The Alamo is a tourist trap of course and overcomercialized to the point that theres little authenticity left and as much as I hate coming to places like this it is still The Alamo, arguably the heart of Texas. As anyone who has met a Texan can tell you they tend to have a certain swagger an arrogance even, a pride of being Texan that you just don’t see from citizens of other states. You don’t see too many people sporting a tattoo of the outline of Ohio behind a flag of red white and blue prominently on their forearm or have regularly repeated expressions like some of my friends would semi-jokingly say “F’ U’ I’m from Texas!”
Hahaha! Gotta love it. Yep, you could say that all of that attitude stems from these hallowed grounds. Remember the Alamo! Fight to the death! Never give up! Fight for what you believe against impossible odds and get it done! Not since Thermopylae has a lost battle been celebrated so much. The courage of these brave men’s sacrifice inspired everyone to do more and fight harder and those men’s courage inspired yet others and so this bravado has spread through the generations.
So yes I know its giant tourist trap commercializing those sacred grounds and profiting from and tainting the memory of her fallen heroes but yet it is still important. A small flicker of truth remains in the Heart of Texas to make it worth seeing and afterwards you can get your coon skin cap and tshirt to show all your friends back home you have been there.
Never static, The Alamo has slowly evolved and changed over time as the city of San Antonio grew up around it. I remember as a kid being able to drive up to the buildings and park alongside the barracks which is now fenced off. In fact the iconic Alamo faced itself was changed many years after the historic battle, had it ever been completed according to plan it would have looked more like Mission Concepción below. For a look at the changes to the mission over time look here.
Theres not much left of the original grounds or the original buildings. Part of the barracks were left and part of the chapel, the rest had been demolished and rebuilt a number of times. James Bowie himself was charged with destroying the mission by General Sam Houston after he decided they did not have enough men to secure it. Colonel Bowie decided to fortify it instead and we all know the rest. One of the last surviving parts of the Alamo was also tied into a large store front.
As you can see most of the original grounds are gone. That which has been beautifully restored, however, is quite amazing if you like old buildings and history. The landscaping was immaculate.
Continue reading The Alamo
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By Lynx, on May 16th, 2011 
We travelled for days nearly getting lost and running out of gas in in the back woods of Texas after our Garmin mistook a cattle trail for a highway and we endured sweltering heat, wind, poisonous fumes and hula-hooping embarrassment all to see killer whales doing tricks. What do we find? CLOSED!! Maybe we are just early… Thats gotta be it, Sea World cant be closed. No, wait, it IS closed! WTF Man!?
I felt exactly like Clark Griswold. If there had been a moose around I would have punched it.
Yep, turns out we arrived too early in the season while the park is closed 3 days a week. Well crap.. NOW what do we do?
Cece decided we should go to the Alamo so we plug it into the GPS and onward! For the first time ever my Garmin’s traffic alerts come on and start working giving us warnings and highlighting slowdowns and blocked routes on the map. Pretty sweet, too bad the traffic features apparantly do not work anywhere in the entire state of New Mexico, not even in Albuquerque. I was happy that the traffic radio does work and I was not ripped off and sent the wrong thing by Amazon like I had been suspecting, however, our digital navigator again led us astray taking us through several sketchy neighborhoods and the wrong way down one way streets.
Eventually I just made note of the general dirrection we needed to go and ignored our GPS completely to try and find a main thoroughfare and we ran smack dab into this.
Continue reading Sea World?
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By Lynx, on May 15th, 2011 The next day we left bright and early to head for Kerrville and Koyote Ranch campground to catch the tail end of the V Star 650 Texas Meet and Greet. I had planned to get there Friday to meet up with everyone but due to a major crisis at work we got delayed and were arriving on Sunday instead and we had to hurry before everyone left. When this thing was planned a year in advance it was going to be a big deal and at least 40 people from our little forum were going to show up but over time more and more people dropped out until there was just 5 besides us. Little did we know that despite several prepaying for cabins we would end up being the only ones to make it, although a few days late.
 Koyote Ranch Pool Because of the mad rush to get there to meet up with anyone who might still be there we didn’t have much time to stop and take pictures, not that there was anything to take pictures of besides cotton fields, wind farms and the West Texas scrub. Halfway there we did have to pull over to rejet the bike. This was expected, my bike is jetted for high altitude and going down more than a mile in altitude is a lot worse for an engine than going up. Going down that far really leans out the fuel mix and can cause overheating and engine damage, going up in altitude just makes it richer and robs power. I’ve done this many times before but this time when I slapped the carb back together the bike would not start. I had to pull it all apart again and try again.
As we neared I-10 I wasn’t paying attention and our GPS led us off course. It ended up taking us 40 miles further than I intended by not taking a more heavily travelled diagonal like I had wanted and instead took us down a series of back country ranch roads that in places were not much wider than a golf cart path. As we approached civilization again and we were extremely low on fuel the Garmin glitched again and wanted us to go down a dirt trail through a locked gate in some barbed wire! This thing is useless! I should go back to paper maps like we’ve always used. Coasting into town on fumes we were able to fill up and get on the super slab, now more than an two hours behind schedule with the detours and jetting.
We were really looking forward to Highway 16 south of Kerrville, our friends have said that it had the craziest switchbacks in all of Texas and indeed the Koyote Ranch’s own website claims “Hwy 16 has consistently been placed on Texas Monthly’s “10 Most Scenic Drives in Texas” list. The drive from Kerrville to Koyote Ranch includes much of this beauty, but it also includes almost 5 miles of switchback turns, which rival any mountain road in America.”
The road was beautiful with some of the best scenery we’d seen all day and the switchbacks were a bit gnarly in places but nothing special compared to real mountain back roads that we were used to but all in all we were pleasantly surprised. I’ve always had a pretty low opinion of the riding in TX and have been a bit skeptical with all the ravings of the hill country and three sisters riding. Is it actually as good as they say or just good for Texas? Now with just a taste of the hill country and the surprise that Texas has any good riding at all we are ready to come back next year when hopefully more people besides us turn up.
There were many bike friendly establishments here including Thunder in the Hills Biker Church, where gritty clothes or an unclean past aren’t obstacles to those seeking God. Really a biker church! Nearby there’s also a motorcycle museum and several bike themed eateries that I found on google. If work had not gotten in the way we would have had 2 days to explore the area, theres always next year. If you are headed this way there are several websites devoted to the areas biker attractions to check out before coming, I found Hill Country Cruising to be one of the best.
Koyote Ranch will be our first motorcycle campground, its quite nice to not have to worry about your bike being too loud to disturb all the backpackers and pick-nickers as you idle to your site for a change. We got there 20 mins past closing and had to find the management sites to let them know we were there and would pay in the morning. It was sunday but the place looked unusually dead for what’s supposed to be a very popular area, unfortunately we were informed by the nice managers (despite being interrupted getting dinner ready) that their well had gone out that morning and there was no water but we were still welcome to stay.
 
Koyote Ranch has a nice layout, RVs in the middle on a flat plain and various sized cabins surrounding on the hillsides with the tents down by the stream bed. The cabins do seem to be a bit closely packed together, however, so it may not be the place to look for peace and quiet if the place is filled up with a bunch of bikers going through. I didn’t get to see inside any of the cabins but the pics online look nice. The prices on everything here seem to be a tad high but you do seem to be getting some quality cabins.
Continue reading Koyote Ranch
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By Lynx, on May 14th, 2011 Trip time again!
We are both incredibly broke this year and I couldn’t afford to do another month on the road again so instead we decided to meet up with the CC&D crowd once again at the Texas Meet and Greet and then just stay exploring Texas for another week and relive a bit of my childhood by visiting places my Grandpa used to take me every summer and that Cece had never been.
First day: We have to get to Texas. I of course didn’t think to take any pictures of this since I’ve been this way many times before and frankly Eastern New Mexico and West Texas is about the most boringest, soul sucking riding imaginable. Its a wasteland of nothingness with no curves or hills. After half a day of this you begin to really look forward to seeing the next heard of cows or windmill for some scenery, like I said it’s bad.
That is until you get to Artesia NM or east of Roswell the way we went and start getting into big oil country where now besides the flat boringness you have noxious fumes, poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas, extreme heat and blowing sand to go with it. West Texas is truly miserable on the back of a motorcycle. I used to live and work out here in the oil fields and it doesnt take long before your body adapts and you cant smell how awful it is here but after being in the crisp fresh mountain air for a decade riding through the gas fumes now is nearly vomit inducing.
A few pics between Vaughn and Roswell from previous rides:
We stayed with my friend Lalo and we were somehow roped into going to a family reunion across town when we got there. They have a giant homemade grill made out of a large pipe with holes cut in the bottom for oxygen and expanded metal across the top. You can really cook a lot of food at a time on one of these bad boys and they had it loaded up. They were doing some family games and activities while we waited and despite my protests I somehow ended up getting pulled into them. I’ve found out that I’m now one of the worst hula-hoopers of all time, I think I may have made it 1/2 a turn one time as my best attempt. I’m blaming it on the terrible exhausting riding before hand as I used to be good way back in elementary class, no its not old age I refuse to accept that!
I did win a picture frame as a prize for licking a Big Red gum wrapper and holding it pressed to my forehead the longest though. Laughing your ass off at everyone else really helps in self torture activities like this. There were many hilarious new stories at Lalo’s expense, like how hes no longer allowed to borrow the in-laws mower after snapping the pull string and breaking it while trying to start it, and a good time had by all.
Continue reading Texas Trip 2011
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