First day of cycling from Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW) back to Cleburne. Beautiful weather for an unloaded bicycle ride. Woke up early and loaded the bicycle in the minivan. A little over an hour and a half of driving and I was at the airport. As I unloaded the bike, the attendants looked on with curiosity. I said, “you don’t have many people here on bicycles?”. “No sir, I think you are the first”. Despite that claim, getting out of the Dallas Airport was very straightforward. First exit back on Rental Car Drive and then take the next road (Airport Road) to the left. Before I knew it I was cycling through Euless. As a whole, todays road conditions were a little easier than I expected. Not always a lot of shoulders, but traffic was fairly light and polite. Only one occasion where I thought, “you really need to learn how to drive around bicycles”.

From Euless, I took 157, also known as Industrial Avenue southbound. At 11 miles I crossed the Trinity River and continued southbound through Arlington. Some gentle grades across low hills. At 18 miles I reached I-20 and stopped for breakfast. From here I was a little confused as 157 was further west, but after a brief detour through some suburban neighborhoods I was back to Cooper Street. Cooper crossed US-287 and ended at business 287. Fun to be on this highway since my home in Fort Collins is only 0.3 miles from 287.

287 became Main Street in Mansfield and had cute old buildings, though didn’t look like much commerce. From here mostly followed smaller side roads including 917. A combination of 15mph headwinds and some hillier terrain made for slightly slower going. At Happy Hill another brief stop. I hadn’t seen many bicyclists and one of the locals asked how far I was riding. I said from “DFW to Cleburne” and he thought that was a pretty far distance. His furthest ride had been 14 miles. I took several different county roads and was back in Cleburne by 1:30pm. It was nice to have an unloaded ride and everything road pretty easily despite feeling a little more tired by hills and wind at the end.

A late lunch at the Chinese buffet where my fortune said “A routine task will turn into an enchanting adventure”. Hmm…I’m having enough fun having my adventure be an adventure - so not sure it is good to have adventuresome routine tasks as well :-). 56 miles cycled today.

Posted by mev in Texas