We live over 900 miles from Georgetown, Texas. As we drive towards home on Interstate 20, I have plenty of time to go through my pictures and put together a blog. Roger just mentioned that when we were working we only drove within a 500-mile radius of home for a tandem weekend. It’s nice to make use of our more “flexible scheduling” (with thanks to Larry Linzer for the fantastic phrase) and expand our territory!
As I look through the photos I see lots of people having fun, and that’s why we like tandeming and rallies so much.

What I don’t see in the pictures is a threat of dangerous weather on Thursday night going into Friday morning. The SWTR folks are concerned that storms could roll in as the day progresses on Friday and they use their emergency texting system (we are SO stealing that for GTR!) to inform us that the 52-mile route is closed, and that all routes will close at 11am. We don’t see any storms until much later in the day on Friday, but better safe than sorry.

The Friday ride is a remote start from The Vineyard at Florence, about 30 minutes away from our host hotel.

We miss the mass start when Roger steps in soft ground that is some sort of mud/slurry/cement and it fills in his clete. Marcia Becker comes to the rescue and takes Roger’s shoe to clean it out. When everyone takes off to start the ride Roger is standing with one shoe off, and one shoe on and we get on the road after everyone else. It’s a fun morning of chase and catch up for us.

Wine tastings take place after the riding is done. The fact that we all have to finish riding by 11am makes for a crowd in the dining room and in the tasting area. After we socialize and taste some wine, we head over to a German biergarten in Walburg.

Georgetown has a lovely historic town square with many nice restaurant options for all of us on Thursday and Friday nights.

We enjoy pizza and beer at the 600 Degrees Pizza and Drafthouse, and genuine Tex-Mex at Dos Salsas.

Saturday morning we ride from the Community Center in the San Gabriel Park. Later, we will have our lunch here after the ride, as well as our social hour and Saturday night banquet, and barn dancing!

I will point out that I saw just as many huge smiles while we were learning to square dance as I did while out on the road! Sorry, I was too busy smiling and dancing to take any photos!

A few thoughts on the Texas experience. The pre-tour in hill country was in fact quite hilly. I expected hills, but I was a little surprised by the wind. I am just not used to the wind as my constant companion. Some of the riding was made much more difficult by the brutal head winds. The official rally routes over the weekend were not as hilly as the pre-tour.  When there was climbing it was usually short bursts of climbing, but not really anything long and drawn out.  We didn’t get many coasting opportunities, which translated to lots of pedaling (and lots of steps on my fitbit)! And one more thing, the road surface is very rough and in many places it’s broken up. They don’t pay state income taxes in Texas and there is not a lot of money for rural road improvement.   It made me really appreciate the roads in my home state of Georgia.

Although we went into this week thinking it would be our one and only appearance at a SWTR we had TOO MUCH FUN! We shall return.

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