About halfway between Houston and San Antonio is the little town of Shiner, best known for the Spoetzl Brewery’s premier product, Shiner Bock. But for those in the know, it’s also near the Lewis ranch, where John and his brother host an annual spring weekend getaway for friends and family on their parents’ estate. Shiner newbies, Varya and I made a day trip out to enjoy fresh air and open Texas countryside with new and old friends and colleagues.
Like any good semi-weekend mechanic, John has a few projects in various stages of progress in the family barn, including a little red Porsche and an old British BSA that he fired up to the delight of onlooking bikers.
After a huge feast of smoked BBQ and guest-provided side dishes, the fabulous Mr. & Mrs. Fox tended bar with a fine selection of their delicious mixologist cocktails.
When a group of well lubricated NASA nerds gather in an unrestricted rural area with tools, PVC and pressure vessels, how do they entertain themselves? Launch projectiles, of course!
Veggie Cannon
Ex-Watermelon
Big thanks to John et al for the fun, food (eaten and exploded) and festivities, and we look forward to our next journey west. Maybe we’ll even stay the night next time (in Shiner, not a tent). 😉
In April of 2023, I loaded up Duca–now sporting an Evotech Tail Tidy, Custom LED Blaster-X tail light, and Skene P3 decelerometer-activated LED lights–and prepared to ride west to Austin for the weekend, stopping first in Fulshear just west of Houston to meet up with my riding buddy David on his trusty BMW GS.
As before, we stayed with our ever-gracious and welcoming friends Erik and Liza in their beautiful home west of Austin, spending our mornings and nights enjoying their company and hospitality and our days enjoying MotoGP at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) and its (in)famous “Horsepower Rodeo” track. Saturday was hot and sunny, so though I’ve never been a “hat guy”, I gladly accepted a free cap at the Rever booth, their reward for showing their app on my phone (Rever membership included with Revzilla’s RPM).
While COTA let us park our bikes for free, the bike parking lot was a long hike or tram/cab ride from the front gates. Next time I suspect we’ll be tempted to pay the price for Ducati Parking directly next to the main grandstand. David may have to swap his GS for his Monster and sacrifice comfort on the ride to Austin in order to enjoy the closest and coolest parking at MotoGP. Plus, you meet the nicest Ducatistas there. 😉
We spent downtime between races both days walking the vast grounds of COTA, exploring MotoGP sights and concessions. Of course, the videos below can not capture the dangerously loud shriek (ear protection is a must) and sense of extreme speed (don’t try this at home) of the world class superbikes and riders competing in Moto3, Moto2 and MotoGP.
After a very exciting final MotoGP race on Sunday, with defending and future World Champion Pecco Bagnaia low-siding out of 2nd place and Alex Rins winning with a dominating 3.5 sec margin, it was time for all of us bikers to mount up and ride home. I’m sure it won’t be too long before we return to COTA, home of the only MotoGP race held in America.
KOOZA was the first Cirque du Soleil show that Varya and I enjoyed in Houston after returning to the US over a decade ago, and after we saw it again in February, became the first repeat show we’ve caught from this Canadian-born troupe. We’ve seen many Cirques over the years, including in Moscow and Las Vegas, and never miss them when they swing through Houston and set up large climate-controlled tents at the Sam Houston Race Park. Their world-class acrobatic acts drawn from around the globe never fail to amaze, set to the intercultural rhythms of live bands, loosely strung together by a “story” unique to each show.
As she often does these days, Varya used KOOZA to debut an outfit made by her own hands and sewing machines. Starting as an offshoot of knitting, sewing her own tops, skirts and dresses has become her primary hobby. Besides choosing her own fabrics, she enjoys customizing her fit, including creating the sufficiently long sleeves so elusive in store-bought tops. Plus, her handmade dresses often have pockets, taken for granted by guys, but apparently all too rare in women’s clothing. She can now outfit herself daily with her own fashionable creations for a couple weeks, maybe longer.
For our first visit to the Virgin Islands, Varya and I escaped Houston in chilly January to enjoy a warm week in the Caribbean paradise of Saint Croix, easily one of our favorite vacations so far!
The first thing you notice after landing at the little Henry E. Rohlsen Airport (STX) on the small island–besides your rental car being scratched and beat to hell (just circle the whole car on the card and write “damaged”)–is that despite driving on the left side of the road like Brits, all cars come from the US mainland and have steering wheels on the left. So, you the driver navigate the left edge of the narrow, twisting roads avoiding tropical flora while trying to keep the rest of the car and your passenger away from oncoming traffic in the middle of the road…very strange. Peering under a big left-pointing arrow sticker at the top of the windshield, I verbally repeated my Cruzan driving mantra, “Stay left…stay left…stay left…”, but still tended to drift right in parking lots. If they didn’t want to import right-steering-wheel cars, why not switch to good ole American right-side driving? It probably wouldn’t take more than a long weekend to switch all the signage on this small island. 😉
Surviving the wrong-sided drive from the south side of the island over big hills to the north, we arrived at our Carambola Beach Resort, dined on the seaside deck and rested from the journey. It wasn’t until the next morning that we truly appreciated the beauty of this rather secluded beach resort butted up against the green hills rolling into the bright blue sea. Our first day was spent relaxing on the beach and enjoying the resort itself before exploring the island in the coming days.
When we ventured out of the resort the next day, we drove east (on the wrong side) along the north shore to Christiansted for lunch by the docks and marina, watching fishing and recreational boats and seaplanes come and go, before continuing east until the road ended at the easternmost spot in all US territory, Point Udall. It is quite a unique experience to stand on a point surrounded in nearly all directions by endless water.
One of the highlights of the week was our evening bioluminescence tour with Sea Thru Kayaks. Drawn to the idea of maximizing our bioluminescent viewing through see-through kayaks, we soon learned these were designed for little people and kids, so we opted for a larger, quicker, more stable open sea kayak, the better choice for full-sized adults. Regardless of kayak size, everyone gets splashed in these tours, and we dressed for a wet nighttime adventure. The glowing and occasionally sparking microbes in Bioluminescent Bay were clearly visible once it got dark, responding to the agitation of our oars with defensive luminosity, albeit more subtly than I expected. To be honest, more than the bio-glow, I enjoyed simply kayaking through tropical bays and lagoons in the dark, quietly gliding across tranquil black water like people have been doing here for countless centuries.
Carambola was never crowded, so beach chairs and dining tables were always available, and we often felt like we had the beach to ourselves. We rented snorkeling gear for a couple days, awkwardly strode into the surf, and swam over reefs just offshore teeming with colorful fish.
On our final day in Saint Croix, we checked out of Carambola and drove west (on the wrong side) to the larger commercial port of Frederiksted, where cruise ships come to port, for one last seaside lunch before heading southeast to Rohlsen airport for our return flight to the mainland.
Rewind to New Years Eve Day, a few weeks before our Saint Croix adventure. Every New Year by tradition, Russians watch an old romcom movie, The Irony of Fate (worth checking out with subtitles). After rewatching it, Varya asked if Americans have a similar traditional New Years movie. The closest we came up with was Trading Places with Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, and Jamie Lee Curtis, since it takes place between Christmas and New Year. As Billy Ray and Louis exchanged congratulatory toasts in the final scene on a beautiful beach, triumphant over the evil Duke brothers, Varya remarked, “We’ll soon be there!”, meaning somewhere like that tropical paradise.
Before we flew to the island, she’d learned that the Trading Places ending scene had indeed been filmed somewhere on Saint Croix. “Cool coincidence,” we thought. Then midweek, as I swam out to a buoy and looked back at the rocky hill on my right giving way to the beach on my left, I realized it appeared all too familiar. Back in the room, I grabbed my iPad and confirmed my suspicion: the Trading Places final scene occurred on the very same Davis Bay Beach we’d been lounging on, the movie filming just a few years before the Carambola Beach Resort was built on the same spot! I’d been swimming right where the sailboat was anchored! We hadn’t realized how accurate Varya’s prediction would prove to be 🙂
Varya also informed me that Dmitri, the waiter who takes their “lobster and cracked crab” order at the end of Trading Places, was played by Barry Dennen, the same actor who’d played Pontius Pilate in the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Skeptical, I had to look it up to confirm. I couldn’t believe Dennen had gone from so dramatically portraying such a consequential Roman Governor, belting out, “Don’t let me stop your great self destruction!”, to a bit part like Dmitri exclaiming, “Extrrra primo good, sir!” in response to a lunch order. Saint Croix taught me much. 🙂
Cracks in interior tiles and walls and changes in shower drainage ultimately led us to hire a foundation inspector last year. As suspected, the front of our house was ~4″ down relative to the back. The fairly level rear half of the house and the lack of any visible cracks along the sides of the foundation showed how much a concrete slab can bend. The culprits were the big oak trees planted too close to the front of the house by developers a couple decades ago (a decade before we moved in), maximizing curb appeal at the expense of future foundation issues. In the midst of increasing heat and drought, our thirsty oaks were draining moisture from the soil beneath the slab, causing the soil to compress and sink along with the slab and house above it.
To shut off the drainage of the big oak roots while we researched foundation repair options, we had a pair of root shields/barriers installed between the two oaks and the house for $2K. Workers dug narrow trenches in 20′ arcs, cutting and removing large tree roots in the process, then inserted surprisingly thin plastic “walls” 3′ deep. No matter how thick the tree roots that were cut, the new roots that sprout from them start as hair-width filaments, easily diverted by the thin sheets of the root shields. The sheets need only be thick enough to stand up against the sides of the trenches while dirt is refilled, and just deep enough to divert new roots that might reach toward the slab rather than downward.
In November, we bit the bullet and hired a foundation repair company to install 35 pilings under the front of the house, 25 exterior and 10 interior, for $14K. They uprooted bushes and piled dirt in the front yard as they dug holes around the sides of the slab.
Inside the holes, they used the immense weight of the house to hydraulically press a couple dozen concrete cylinders into the soil in long stacks or pilings, down to the “hard clay” (though that sounds like an oxymoron, like “soft rock” or “clean coal”).
To avoid the immense expense and risk of constructing long tunnels beneath the house for the interior pilings, they jackhammered and dug straight through the floor…the “new” floor we’d just installed a few years earlier during post-flood reconstruction after Hurricane Harvey.
Digging and installing pilings took several days with some rain delays, but the actual lifting and leveling of the front half of the house took just minutes. All the cracks in the walls and gaps in exterior expansion joints closed quickly. Months before, I’d placed a little wooden hors d’oeuvre fork in the largest crack in the bedroom to gauge if the crack was slowly widening (clever), but unfortunately forgot to remove it prior to leveling, so it became embedded in the wall when the crack closed (not so clever). The monkeys were unfazed by the house moving around them.
With pilings installed, house leveled and holes filled, the workers topped off the interior holes with concrete and left it to us to repair the floor…again. We discovered foundation repair guys were better at digging holes than refilling them, better at removing bushes than replanting them. About half of the unevenly replaced bushes died.
Other lessons learned during this all-too-typical adventure for Houston homeowners in the coastal plain?
If your city was built in a swamp on clay, go ahead and pour piers with your slab when building a house, and plant oaks at least 30′ away (unless you’re a developer who knows you’ll be long gone by the time the 3rd owner has to deal with the slab foundation issues).
We gathered a surprisingly wide range of bids for foundation repair, from $5K from a fly-by-night company to $65K for whole-house overkill. There was an interesting range of technologies as well, from simple concrete pilings to Ramjet’s helical threaded metal pipe piers derived from drilling (my fav of the tech options, but well over $30K).
Once foundation repair is done, you get to spend a similar amount on flooring and wall repair and painting, landscaping to replace dead bushes and grass, repairing/replacing broken mortar in brick walls and broken/displaced hardy board siding, and, in our case, rebuilding a brick column wrapping the driveway gate pole that was leaning in the same dry soil. Soon, we’ll also replace driveway segments that have sunk like the front of the house due to the same oak trees.
If your 1st floor is flooded and you have to reconstruct everything anyway, maybe go ahead and check your foundation before rebuilding, just so you don’t have to do it again a few years later (not that I’m bitter).
Silver lining: everything is level and looking new again, at least on the 1st floor. Now about that tired old carpet on the 2nd floor…
Indulging her fashionista tendencies, Varya’s latest hobby is making clothes for herself, including this skirt and turtleneck she created for my birthday dinner…
When she asked what sort of dress she should make for a friend’s holiday party the next night, I suggested it should look like a present…for me! 😉
She’s pretty handy with threads and fabrics, but can hers light up like my hi-tech Amazon scarf?! (OK, she still wins.)
Varya and I returned to the Lakeway Resort on Lake Travis last fall for our respective loops, her knitting and my biking. Lakeway already had holiday decorations out to greet guests arriving for the knitting retreat and weekend getaways.
While Varya and her fellow knitters showed off their creations (including her hoodie and shawl in these pics) and tackled new techniques and projects, Duca and I looped and twisted around the lakes, following a route I mapped out in Rever. Despite needing UI improvements, Rever is handy for planning a moto tour on roads with Butler G1-3 ratings, but always overestimates time required, or rather underestimates average speed. So, riders may assume Rever’s “TOTAL TIME” includes several stops for gas, lunch, naps, etc.
Speaking of lunch, I found a great place to stop in Llano, Cooper’s Old Time Pit BBQ, and enjoyed a couple pounds of excellent smoky meats…mmmmm. South of Llano, I rode by the locally famous Enchanted Rock that I’d heard about since first arriving in Houston decades ago. Sure, a pink granite hill is kinda cool, I guess, but I wasn’t enchanted enough to dismount, much less pay the $5 entrance fee.
Back at Lakeway, we enjoyed the resort’s stone decor, tasty dining, and tranquil vistas from our balcony. No doubt we’ll return again for more fun in the Texas Hill Country.
Late last October, Varya and I loaded up the old Lex and trailered Duca up through NE TX and a bit of OK to Eureka Springs, AR. The plan was for Sean & Keri to ride down from KC on his H-D and Greg to ride south on his KTM from StC for a couple days of hilly rides around Eureka. Unfortunately, an inescapably large, fearsome storm front on the horizon kept Sean & Keri in KC and forced Greg to ride home the next day to beat the deluge.
Before the storm, Greg, Varya and I stayed at the 1886 Crescent Hotel, basically an Ozark version of The Shining hotel, complete with an old, creepy vibe and ghosts of past horrors.
As Greg escaped on his Austrian, a little cold rain creeped into Eureka Springs warning of worse weather to come. Varya and I did a little damp shopping in the artsy/crafty town (OK, she shopped for baubles and beads while I sought a bar advertising “Husband Day Care Center”) before returning to the hotel to enjoy autumn afternoon views.
That night, we joined a Ghost Tour, in which a creepy old-timey nurse led us around our hotel while describing its haunted history. A fraudster once ran it as the Baker Hospital for Cancer Cure, preying upon rich, gullible, desperate patients who typically didn’t survive long enough to file suit. According to our “nurse” guide’s script, some may still roam the halls as spiteful spirits seeking solace. She invited us to take plenty of photos of specific rooms and slightly warped mirrors conveniently placed at the ends of halls, and to let the staff know if our phones caught anything spooky. Varya claims a blurred shape on the side of one of her pics looks like a child’s arm–perhaps the arm of the long-deceased child said to roam these halls! (I wasn’t convinced.)
Sadly, we saw no paranormal activity or apparitions on a tour that seemed a bit pricey for just a guided walk around the hotel–they could have rigged up a hologram or at least an eerie soundtrack. 😉 Perhaps the weirdest part of the tour was at the end…in the dark basement…with shelves full of bottled tumors removed from dead patients who apparently were not cured by Norman Baker.
After a couple nights in the so-called “Ghost Hotel” of Eureka Springs, we drove north into the expected big storm front. As Lex-rocking winds and torrential rains severely limited visibility, we slowly made our way across MO to Mom’s townhouse in Saint Charles by late afternoon.
Denied the Pig Trail and other famous Ozark roads by bad AR weather, Greg and I took advantage of the first clear, sunny day of the week by riding SW from StC in a big loop around central/southern MO. Greg’s been riding most of his life, and I’ve ridden for a couple decades, yet this was our first time riding together. After the wet, gray, abbreviated stay in Eureka Springs, this picturesque, spirited day ride through the colorful fall leaves of southern MO with my oldest schoolmate (at least a month older than me!) made trailering Duca all that way worthwhile.
Finally, the main event of the northern journey: on Mom’s 80th birthday, a couple dozen of her closest friends and family gathered at Tony’s on Main Street, perhaps the finest restaurant in St. Charles, to celebrate her eight decades on Earth. Tony’s excellent cuisine (oh, those medallions!) were well complemented by Scott’s cakes, Sean’s beverages, and everyone’s favorite stories about Jeanne, which Claire declared were to be shared while adorned with the Birthday Queen sash! 🙂
During the drive back south to Houston, I began noticing a strange sound, increasing with speed, coming from our right rear wheel. I eventually discovered thin wires sticking out of the walls just beneath the tread of our relatively new Kumho Road Venture tires. Discount Tire replaced it under warranty, of course, but call me a former fan of inexpensive Kumho tires from South Korea. Back to pricier Yokohama Geolandars!
Cute town and ghost hotel in the Ozarks, surviving severe weather, beautiful bike ride, and partying with octogenarians…not bad for a one week road trip!
What says American Independence Day in Texas more than a pan full of of choice cuts marinated all night, grilled on the back patio, served alongside Varya’s excellent side dishes and shared with Dad and Elaine last July 4th?! As my beef-loving, naturalized American Girl often says when passing a steakhouse or cattle ranch, “Mmmmmm…steaks!”
April moto-mayhem in the Texas Hill Country seemed like the ideal way to try out Jerry’s new 2015 Honda Repsol SP before he headed north to Denver for new Sierra Nevada and Rockies adventures. Friday morning, Jerry trucked and I rode Duca west outta Houston to Bandera west of San Antonio, where we took our bikes for a quick afternoon loop north of Comfort. (The Rever app is good for creating GPX files for my Garmin Zumo, but way overestimates time required for distance–4.33 hours to cover 111.13 miles suggests a school zone pace under 26 mph…on a motorcycle! Really, Rever?!)
After a night of dining and moderate revelry in downtown Bandera, the real ride began Saturday morning. Zipping up 16 to Medina, we turned due west on Ranch Road 337, one of Texas’ infamous Three Twisted Sisters. North of Vanderpool, we stopped to check out the impressive private collection of 60+ vintage bikes at the Lone Star Motorcycle Museum. Soon we rolled into Leakey, pronounced “lay-key” as locals have corrected me, not leaky as it appears…as that might suggest a need for another little Texas town, Sealy. 😉
Just west of Leakey is the Frio Canyon Motorcycle Stop, a must-stop for any passing biker seeking parts, accessories, apparel, food, drink and live music. Judging by the amusingly similar bikes and trikes populating the parking lot, Harleys with 2 or 3 wheels are the all-too-common choices of the rugged individuals populating Frio’s live band and bar area.
We bought a couple shirts and souvenirs and continued west before some of the under-geared and over-lubricated Harley boys staggered back to their hogs. At Camp Wood, we turned north on RR 335, the second Twisted Sister, zipped east on 41, and turned south on RR 336, our last and perhaps curviest Sister. After navigating an especially twisty part (a Butler Maps G1 road), I parked beneath a shade tree in Leakey and waited for Jerry…and waited. Just as I was thinking of riding back north, he rolled in and revealed he’d experienced a little gravity attack in the middle of a tight turn. Fortunately, no serious injury and most of the bike damage was cosmetic, but a little oil leak was big enough to leave the Honda in Leakey while we rode 2-up on Duca (sadly without photo evidence) to retrieve his truck from Bandera.
Thus ended our moto-tour before we could ride NE to Kerrville, but not our big Saturday night in Bandera. We had a tasty dinner in a little joint with cold beverages and hot guitar licks by the impressively excellent Jake Castillo Trio out of San Antonio. From Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jake handled classic riffs and solos with veteran ease belying thousands of hours blues-rocking south Texas clubs and bars.
An old friend of Jerry’s joined us for Sunday brunch before Jerry drove to nearby San Antonio for Easter with family and I rode Duca back east to Houston and home, having enjoyed one last Hill Country moto-weekend before Jerry became a Colorado mountaineer.
Moonday 