MS150 Chronicles, Part One

PROLOGUE

Well now, it seems things don't always work out how you planned. Having returned from an extended contract job in San Diego, I had been home for a week, got reacquainted with Sharon, and was primed and ready to go for the MS150 ride on April 16th. Road Bike preventive maintenance? Check. Training Rides? Check. Official MS150 certification of road bike? Check. In this case, the word “Check” means that I have done none of these things, but see, having done 10 of them in the past, including nine in a row, I have come to the realization that training, preventive maintenance and certifications are so much Fooferall, if not a downright obstacle to the mission at hand: riding 175 miles over a weekend with 13,000 other folks, including a statistically significant percentage of which are on prescription medication for Hyper Attention Deficit Disorder.

Not that that doesn't make them nice persons.

Anyway, this year, things did not go as planned, and I was called back to work 36 hours before the start. I took solace in the fact that, even though I wasn't going to be able to do the ride, my Friends and Family had come through for me with almost $1,400 in donations. So, my MS150 Chronicles will not be a recounting of the Ride, but the Road; specifically, from Houston to Chicago over the MS150 weekend.

THURSDAY

Regretting however temporarily the circumstances that had decided that my course lay not in a generally westerly direction from Houston towards Austin on my trusty Bridgestone road bike, but in the company vehicle northbound for Chicago, I rolled from Houston towards our home office in Gravette, AR Thursday afternoon. Gravette is centrally located to something on at least three points of the compass: go ten miles North and you hit Missouri, where you can purchase alcohol; go ten miles East and you come to Bentonville, AR, WalMart's corporate headquarters; go ten miles West and you hit Oklahoma, where you can purchase alcohol.

Not sure if there's any point in ever heading south of Gravette, except to drive home.

The drive Thursday is unremarkable, except for the fact that the GPS has routed me via Hwy 59, skimming the border of Louisiana, instead of the usual route straight up I-45 through Dallas. No complaints here. Pre-GPS, I had intentionally taken the more Easterly routes to Gravette so as to avoid I-45, given that it is devoid of scenery and necessitates driving through Dallas, best described as one vast Speed Trap, its downtown an incoherent jumble of concrete and glass, unpleasing to the eye and made even more-so by those godawful colored lights they use to outline their skyscrapers. What's up with the red, green and white anyway? Kind of makes you wonder why they didn't form a Committee before they started Tarting up their skyline, and that's saying a lot for any of you who know me, as I am no lover of Committees. Plus, there's not a restaurant in the Metroplex that's worth a damn any closer than Ft. Worth.

My travels on what I've come to call the Eastern Route include an assortment of colorful town names, and I'm zipping up Hwy 59 through Lufkin and then Nacodoches, then past the municipalities of Kilgore, Naples, Detroit and Idabel, and that's before I even break Latitude on the aforementioned Metroplex. The country is beautiful: rolling hills with beautiful ranches on either side of the road. I'm surprised at the amount of land given over to livestock as opposed to crops, but then, this is Texas.

Now is as good a time as any to tell my story about Dallas' Overpasses. Seems that several of my fellow Contract employees hail from Dallas, and at least three of them – apropos of absolutely nothing - have volunteered in conversation that Dallas is home to the biggest highway overpasses in the country, and specifically the “High Five”. I did not know what the High Five was prior to this, so I looked it up on the Internet, and according to Wikipedia, it is an “award winning five-level Stack Interchange”. Now, I don't know if Dallas is home to the biggest overpasses in the country, as Houston has several with all the elevation and velocity of a world-class Roller Coaster. What I do know, though, is that we don't consider it a particular source of civic pride, and nobody in Houston goes around bragging on them as if they're the Sistine Chapel.

I also suspect that attendance to whatever awards ceremony it is that hands out statues to Five Level Stack Interchanges is likely not Standing Room Only, except perhaps in Dallas, TX, devoid as they are of culture.

I cross over into Oklahoma and continue my border skimming route, this time with Arkansas mere miles to my right. Even though Arkansas is the objective, I must run through a significant portion of Oklahoma before I make the inevitable jog to the East. I move through Broken Bow and quickly pass Heavener, Shady Point and Panama. But, let us say more about Dallas.

Whatever its other deficiencies, as a matter of principle, I avoid Dallas primarily because it is home to two of the biggest, greediest, most self-aggrandizing Assholes in professional sports franchise history: Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Mark Cuban of the NBA Mavericks. Not that Houston hasn't had our share of greedy, self-aggrandizing professional sports franchise Assholes, mind you. As Exhibit A, I give you Bud Adams - the man who took the Houston Oilers to Tennessee after ripping off the city for $90 million dollars. The difference between Houston and Dallas is that we had the good sense to drive our Asshole out of town, whereas Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban not only wander the streets of Dallas as free men, but are celebrated by Dallas High Society, are frequently invited into the homes of decent people and even allowed within 500 feet of elementary schools, playgrounds and daycare centers.

But I digress.

I make it through Texas, a sliver of Oklahoma and then on into Arkansas without incident, stopping about two hours south of Gravette. It's a pretty low mileage day as these trips go, but I'm not due in until 9am on Friday. I find a Notel Motel for the night and settle in, intending to hit the road around six in the morn.