Michele and my preferred anniversary weekend getaway involves a good hike/bike followed by a nice high-calorie meal. Canyon of the Eagles is a vacation resort/campground about ninety minutes outside of Austin, TX that Michele and I have been to a couple times. It’s probably someone’s old ranch land that got converted into an eco-nature-retreat-center, but that’s not what this story is about. It’s got good camping, and cabins simple enough to be cosy, but with AC and heat and good showers. For the record, the restaurant there served me the SECOND largest piece of carrot cake of my life, the biggest being Gibson’s Steak House in Chicago.
The first time we went there for an anniversary we brought our bikes, with the intention of riding back out the “canyon” for a long ride, and the previous night we’d loved the twists and inclines of the road as we drove in. That morning we carbed and geared up for the ride and promptly pedaled into a long, sustained grade of hill that we were NOT going to overcome. Looking at the map today, I can not see what section it was that did us in, but on a bike, years ago, it seemed like a monster. I remember knowing that even if we made it all the way up the biggest hill, the rest of the ride was going to be a punishing uphill climb out to any semblance of civilization. We pedaled our poor bikes uphill at walking pace for a while, and even push-walked them a bit before giving up and turning around in frustration.
As our anger-adrenaline levels cooled, on the very pleasant downhill coast back into the resort, we agreed that it was too nice a morning to give up completely, so we loaded our bikes back onto the rack on the back of her beloved (and now very recently traded) Ford Fiesta, and drove into Burnett, the nearest town. We had a lovely ride around town and into the surrounding, much more cycle-friendly, hills. There was a period of light rain, that we were able to experience as a cooling mist on a sunny day, rather than a road slicking nightmare that it would have felt like had we been struggling up and down our original route. It ended, as all my favorite rides do, at a kolache (Czech-German pig in a blanket) shop.
We have not yet made it back to Canyon of the Eagles with our bikes, but mostly because of the many other wonderful bike-a-versary locations we’ve explored over the years. This year we will stay-ca-a-versary, for obvious reasons, but I’d like to try that hill again. We are due for a trip back, and I’m in the mood for carrot cake.