Vacation Day

Today I burned a vacation day. I have several left before the end of the year and its a use it or lose it proposition. So since I knew the weather would be awesome I decided to go for a ride. The temperature was supposedly 37 in Mckinney when I left but dressed appropraitely and was comfortable the entire day.

My route was 340 miles, I wanted to check out a couple of areas I've been researching, namely Winnsboro, TX, as they have an Autumn Trails festival to celebrate the fall color. There's not a tremendous amount of fall color in Texas so I didn't know what to expect. I decided to ride FM 852 from Winnsboro to Gilmer as I had read a couple of ride reports that said it was a very good East Texas ride.

The one frustration with the Autumn Trails festival that I experienced, is that its not well documented on the web and the trails were not laid out for general access. Since I had a relatively long day I stuck to my plan and did not stop in town to seek out the trails, although I did pass one marker to a road that did catch my eye.

FM 852 was a pleasant ride, I guess I was expecting a bit more, but in all it was good. The color unfortunatley is quite lacking in Texas this fall as we are in a bit of a drought. We have not had any significant rain in weeks, and even back home, in the land of fall color, we need wet weather in late summer and early fall to generate the vibrant colors. So I saw a lot of brown, mixed in with some yellows, some gold and a bit of red.

The squirrels to day must have had a deathwish however. I saw several crossing the road, however there was one unfortunate squirrel soul who attempted to navigate 4 lanes. He would have made it, however as squirrels do, he stopped midway, ran a couple of circles like he was doing some taunt or ritual dance, then proceeded to try to run between the wheels of an oncoming Camaro. Even though the wheels missed him it was a violent downdraft that he could not escape.

The rest of the ride was somewhat uneventful, but very pleasant. I stopped in the Paris HD dealership. I have been at or by several times but this is the first time I stopped in when they were open, it is a surprisingly large dealership and they had some very nice bikes in the shop.

The return from Paris was intended to be a bit of a pre-ride for our Nov 22 trip home. There are three points of interest on the way home I wanted to check out. The first is Bug Tussle, TX. I found it, and the former what I think may have been the post office, unfortunatley someone has stolen the sign, so that was quite a letdown.

Point 2 was the bridge over the Red River on Hwy 78. This was not intended to be a point of interest, merely a means to the next point but this turned into a true bonus. The next part of the ride was a bit boring, read, straight, flat road... then onto a county road that needed a bit of maintenance, then onto the crown jewel of the trip, Carpenter's Bluff Bridge.

I took a couple of shots and am anxious to get the group there for hopefully some shots crossing the bridge.