For day two of our trip to Fredericksburg in central Texas, we decided to take it a bit easy and wait for the weather to warm up a bit more before pursuing further adventures on our 2-wheeled machines.  This also gave us a chance to catch up with the wives and see some of the cultural offerings of Fredericksburg.

After a slow start to the morning, we finally are out the door around 10am or so to head to the Nimitz World War II museum.  If you have never been, I highly encourage you to go.  The museum alone is worth the trip to Fredericksburg.  The museum is actually an old hotel that has since been added onto and converted to support the thousands and thousands of visitors that go through the museum each year.  Here is a link that will take you to the website for the museum so that you can get a sense of what it looks like from the outside.  http://www.pacificwarmuseum.org/index.asp

Once you go into the museum and start looking around, you quickly realize this is something special.  The hotel section of the museum is just part of what is available.  There is an entire courtyard with plaques commemorating ships, officers and a special section for each of the presidents that served in WWII.  Here are a couple of pictures of what you find outside.

Once we were finished with the courtyard, we made our way into the second building.  This is where the real surprise came.  In this second building you will find multiple airplanes as well as tanks, guns, jeeps and even a submarine from WWII.  It is just amazing.  About the best advice I can give someone planning on going to the museum is go early and plan to be there awhile.  There is so much to see that we were not able to get through all of it.  You could definitely spend the entire day looking at what the museum has to offer.

After the museum, we headed over to Auslander for lunch.  Authentic German food which was very good.  I had the pepper sausage and sauerkraut.  Of course my stomach didn’t like it later, but my tongue was happy with it at the time.  German beer was excellent and after a late lunch, we headed back to the house.  At least the guys did.  The girls were off to go shopping.

At home, we assembled our gear and went for a quick ride on the bikes just so that we could say we rode every day.  As you can tell from the pictures above, the weather was perfect and being out in the sun on the bike was much wanted after the dark, drizzly day we encountered coming down to Fredericksburg.

We took a leisurely jaunt up 965 towards the Enchanted Rock and then on over to 16.  From there we turned south, did the Willow City Loop and back to 16.  Turned north to go back up to 965 and took that the other direction towards Fredericksburg.  We stopped in at Enchanted Rock and took a few pictures.  Yes, those are people standing way up there on top.  We decided not to venture that far as we were more anxious to get back to riding.  The rock is apparently a big piece of granite coming up out of the middle of Texas and as it comes up, it continues to slough off pieces of itself.  Very strange to see and reminds me of the big rock in Georgia – Stone Mountain – that basically does the same thing.  Here’s a picture of Enchanted Rock.

After visiting the rock, we finally made our way back to Fredericksburg.  Was a great day seeing the sights.

We rode down to Fredericksburg, Texas, from Dallas yesterday.  The weather was not pleasant – that’s an understatement.  The weather was downright crappy.  Cold with temps in the 40’s, windy with gusts at 20-35mph and the occasional drizzle mixed in just for fun.  We left around 9:15 and got in around 3:30 which is really not too bad for time wise.

Oh, and by the way, if you update the firmware in your Sena headset, be ready to re-pair all of your devices and the intercom with your buddy.  What I thought would be a simple connection, wasn’t.  I had a difficult time understanding the instruction manual (pdf on the iPad) and when to press which button.  On the side of the road with your mates waiting on you in the cold wind created too high of a level of performance anxiety and I had to give it up.  I was able to get it accomplished the next morning with little trouble.

The wind was ferocious.  Given that the wind was out of the north-west and we were generally heading south or south-west, it was either at our backs or coming on strong over our right shoulder.  Several times we would be going around a curve in the road to the right and the wind would almost push us into the other lane.  That definitely caused some sphincter constriction.  Add to the wind the light drizzle and all of a sudden you have some significant worry about whether or not the bike is going to slide out from under you.

We came through Fort Worth to get to 377 to Grandbury. From there, we turned south down to Glen Rose then on to Hico for lunch at the Koffee Kup and yes that’s how they spell it. It’s great food – chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes both covered in cream gravy, a small salad and for dessert, we had coconut pie. Yummy! I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) eat all of mine, but the taste was awesome. There’s nothing like home cooking.

[side note on the Koffee Kup – all of the waitresses in there are older. They have to be at least in their 50’s and look liike they have been doing that job for a long time. They are great – nothing wrong with them at all. But what was funny is they had another woman who was clearing and cleaning the tables – “bus girl”. She was younger. I imagined that she just wasn’t old enough to wait tables even though she was in her 40’s.]

From Hico, down to Hamilton to Goldwaithe to Fredericksburg. If you have never traveled down TX 16, it is well worth it. The flowers yesterday were just beautiful. This time of year brings out the best in Texas flora. I probably should have stopped to take a picture or two, but we had been on the bike for over an hour and had drank too much coffee and water. That combination with the cold and drizzle…well, you get the idea.

But with all of that, we made it.  Looking forward to Day 2.  May do a brief ride this morning and then hit the museum and some shopping around town. The big ride will be on day 3 and then headed home on day 4.