{"id":3670,"date":"2006-04-16T18:53:08","date_gmt":"2006-04-16T23:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2006\/04\/16\/texas-hill-country-2006-hilly-windy-hot-wormy\/"},"modified":"2024-09-20T13:22:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T18:22:28","slug":"texas-hill-country-2006-hilly-windy-hot-wormy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/04\/16\/texas-hill-country-2006-hilly-windy-hot-wormy\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas Hill Country 2006: Hilly, Windy, Hot &#038; Wormy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some random observations from the little burg of Fredericksburg, during our participation in the 2006 edition of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ehct.com\/\">Easter Hill Country Bicycle Tour<\/a>, hosted this year by the Lubbock Bicycle Club&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There must be some kind of city ordinance in this German community that prohibits the spelling of the word &#8220;house&#8221; in any fashion other than &#8220;haus.&#8221; The Pool Haus. The Guest Haus. The Haus of Kraut. (OK, I made that one up.)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">Willie Nelson singing a Beatles song is just <em>wrong<\/em>. And I don&#8217;t care how cowgirl-foofy the dress shop, they shouldn&#8217;t be providing him an outlet for such &#8220;music.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">You never know what you&#8217;re going to encounter on a back country Texas road (in case you&#8217;re wondering, the bike is ten feet long):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin: 1em; width: 640px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/nature\/snake.jpg\" alt=\"Photo - Rat snake in Gillespie County\" \/><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Spring has not been kind to Texas wildflowers, which were a no-show around Fredericksburg and Kerrville. What we lacked in floral scenery we more than made up in sweat and worms. This was the hottest weekend of the year, with temps hitting the low 90s on Saturday, during our longest ride of the tour (around 50 miles). Strong winds were a mixed curse; they did seem to mitigate the heat somewhat, but made us work the bike that much harder. But the worst part of the weekend was the worms.Well, technically, they aren&#8217;t worms&#8230;they&#8217;re caterpillars, commonly known as <a title=\"More information\" href=\"http:\/\/bexar-tx.tamu.edu\/HomeHort\/F1Column\/2005%20Articles\/APR24.htm\">&#8220;oak leaf rollers.&#8221;<\/a> For a brief time in the spring of most years, these icky creatures descend by the millions from the foliage of live oaks and other similar trees, dangling by a slender thread that might be 30 or 40 feet long. I snapped a photo to give you an idea; see below. These things are about six inches long and as big around as a bratwurst and deliver a nasty bite that can easily become infected. OK, I lied about all of that. They&#8217;re only about an inch long or less and don&#8217;t bite. But they do have a tendency to sway with the breeze and land on your clothes, your hair, your car, your bike, your dog and anything else that you&#8217;d normally wish to be caterpillar-free. They&#8217;re messy and yucky and we hates &#8217;em. And they were out in full force this weekend. (One night during dinner at a cozy little Italian restaurant in F&#8217;burg [Pasta Bella, if you must know] I glanced over at a rather large fellow sitting at the next table, and was mesmerized by the sight of one of the caterpillars making its way up his neck, heading for his ear. He never made it, but the whole scene was quite entertaining.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin: 1em;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/nature\/fburgworm.jpg\" alt=\"Photo - Oak Leaf Roller caterpillar\" \/><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>We did a bit of shopping in F&#8217;burg. Here&#8217;s a word to the wise: don&#8217;t go there looking for a grapefruit knife. But we did score some appetizing foodstuffs, and I found some things that seem to be perfect for Blogathon 2006 contest prizes (and, yes, they&#8217;re what you think they are):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 1em;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/fireanteggs.jpg\" alt=\"Photo - Fire Ant Eggs\" \/><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Unlike 90% of the people who travel from Midland to the Hill Country, we drive I-10, coming and going. We&#8217;re not interested in doing much other than getting there, and getting back. We make two stops going (the first at the Town &amp; Country in Iraan for driving victuals &#8212; Cheetos and Diet Dr. Peppers; the next at the rest stop outside of Sonora). On the return trip, we hit the same rest stop, and then stop in Ozona for either a snack or a coke or both. But that&#8217;s neither here nor there. What I really want to do is make a totally objective but unquantified observation. Over the past xx years of traveling the interstate, it&#8217;s been my belief that the most common out-of-state license plates belonged to either California or Florida. This year, there was a noticeable difference. By far the most prevalent non-Texas license plates I saw were from Mexico, primarily the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">The other thing I saw this weekend was <em>way<\/em> too many older-than-middle-aged guys riding Harleys. That&#8217;s not overly annoying; we&#8217;d rather share the road with motorcycles than cars, as they have almost as much to lose by tangling with a bicycle as the bicycle itself. No, the annoying thing is the apparent contractual obligation that requires that every visible piece of clothing worn by those riders must sport the Harley-Davidson logo. Guys, here&#8217;s a fashion tip: the Harley skull-cap doesn&#8217;t make you look dangerous, except perhaps to that platter of schnitzel at der Auslander (where, by the way, <a title=\"Kinky Friedman for Governor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kinkyfriedman.com\/\">the Kinkster<\/a> himself was pressing the flesh on Friday night).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All in all, it was a good long weekend, even without the wildflowers and even with the worms. But it was also good to get back to the wide open spaces of west Texas, where the wind is <em>supposed<\/em> to blow.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; width: 640px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/nature\/iraanlandscape.jpg\" alt=\"Photo - Wind Farm between Iraan and McCamey, Texas\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ordinary adventures in the Texas Hill Country<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,59,14,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-texas-hill-country","category-travel","category-wildlife-snakes","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3670"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14280,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions\/14280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}