The plan for today was to start early, spend an hour getting to the start of our last challenge set - The Twisted Sisters - and finish them by lunch time, then make a dent in our travel to return home. Well, mother nature apparently wasn't tuned in to our plans...
As I usually do first thing when I get up in the morning is to check my weather app on my Ipod. I was shocked to see a rather large "blob" of thunderstorms headed directly for us from the northeast! The forcast had called for "scattered showers" which usually means "later in the day from the heating of the sun" not active storms at dawn! Larry and I checked out a few sources and we agreed, based on what we were seeing that the storms appeared to be moving pretty fast and that if we delayed an hour or so they would pass by and we could go on with our plan after that.
The map on the left shows our overnight location with the blue pin and the weather front not moving as it would appear normally (northwest to southeast), but rather like a spear with a big head aimed right at us! We actually saw lightning while we were loading the bikes and when we got back from the in-house breakfast, it had already started to sprinkle where we were. So, we waited, but as the sun came up the storm seemed to slow down such that had we left when we were ready we might have made it out in front of it, but now we were committed to waiting it out. Well, long story short, we ended waiting until almost 11:00 AM before we could leave, and even then we were geared up for rain AND we modified our route to run out further east around the "back" of the head of the storm.
To make things even more exciting, there was also a weather advisory for flash flood warning that included one of the roads we were preparing to take! Well, we rode down I-10 to Junction TX and got off the interstate there, fueled up and then called to local sherriff's department to check if our intended route down TX-377 has any reported closures. They said no so we opted to try it. Now, there were at least 5 signs along the way warning of potential flooding over the next 30 miles, and we did go over two bridges where the water was very near the road surface, but ultimately, we made it down to near Rocksprings where we would make out entry onto the first of the three twisted sisters roads - FM-335.
The "Twisted Sisters" are three FM "Farm to Market" roads in Texas Hill Country. FM-335, FM-336, and FM-337. The tree roads together total approximately 125 miles of roller-coaster like riding, along with some nice views of very small canyons, and lots of streams, arroyos (dried up river beds), and a few larger rivers. There are NUMEROUS places where the water can and sometimes does come up over the road, many indicated with "flood gauges" that are essentially long yardsticks that stick up alongside the road to indicate how high over the road the water may be at such an occasion. Given the weather and the severity of the published flash flood warnings, we were extremely lucky to NOT encounter any significant water over the roadways. We did see the occasional puddle or wet road surface, both of which commanded our respect. The other bonus with the weather was that it remained cloudy for most of the day which helped keep the temps from climbing too far into the 90's!
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| Our final Day's route |
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| Elevation Profile as we rode up and down the canyon walls! |
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| Ominous skies behind us when we stopped in Junction TX for fuel |
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| Larry at the 335 start |
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| Larry at the Camp Wood City limit (end of 335) |
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| Bill at the Frio Canyon Motorcycle Stop in Leakey |
We stopped for lunch at the Bent Rim Grill - Bill posed above (with his water hose in mouth)
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| Larry at the start of 336 |
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| Larry at 41 (end of 336) |
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| Larry at the 337 sign just as we leave Leakey |
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| Larry at the Medina sign (Official end of 337 and our Best 15 Challenge Ride) |
Most of these pix show Larry because I took them of him. Rest assured a similar set of ME at each of these spots exists!
