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Intersection of Hwy 83 & 337 in Leakey Texas
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The annual Honda ST rider's Cheap STOC (ST Owner's Club) Rally was held May 6-8 in Camp Wood, Texas. That's right, May 8th was Mother's Day, but that didn't seem to bother anyone very much. They must have been abused children? Tomas, Marco, Ed and I rode up on Thursday from Mission/Edinburg and going by way of Boerne. Marco had a service scheduled for 9:30am at the Alamo BMW Motorcycle dealer. We left Mission at 4:30am and Edinburg by 5:00am. Marco went ahead of us once we stopped for coffee in Falfurrias, but we met up about 11am at the dealership. We were off to Camp Wood via Bandera, Medina, Vanderpool. and Leakey by 3pm and arrived by 5:30pm. We stopped in Leakey at Hogpen BBQ right on the intersection of Hwy 83 & 337.
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| Ed's pretending to read at Lost Maples Restaurant |
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| Keith, Man in Black is wanted in several counties |
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| Restaurant |
some of us had just ridden the Three Sisters (Hwy 335, 336, & 337) we decided to do something different so we rode to Utopia via 337, 83 and 1050 for breakfast at the Lost Maples Restaurant Cafe.
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| We met these guys at our motel. Cycling from San Diego to Austin averaging approximately 60 miles per day |
From there we headed south on 187 to Sabinal then west on 90 through Uvalde and into Brackettville, about 30 miles east of Del Rio. Brackettville is home to the Alamo remake which was used for the movie by John Wayne. It's open for tourists if you're into that kind of thing.
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| Stuart Bat Cave At Kickapoo Cavern State Park |
Brackettville was our destination in order to get to Hwy 674 to Rocksprings. It's one of my favorite road which doesn't get much use. It's about 60 miles from Brackettville to Rocksprings and it's a great ride. About halfway up 674 is the
Kickapoo Cavern State Park which is about a two mile ride onto the State Park Road. It's also about as little known as Hwy 674, but worth the time to visit.
Last summer the countryside on this highway was really green, but this time around with our drought conditions, it was rather dry, but the stark contrast made it a very nice ride.
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| Feed the Trough BBQ in Rocksprings |
Once we got to Rocksprings we decided to stop at Feed the Trough BBQ. It was late afternoon and they were just taking the beef right off the grill. Don't know how it tasted since we stuck to the Root Beer Floats as we had planned an "all you can eat" catfish dinner back in Camp Wood. Mistake!
Back in Camp Wood we had a good, but not great catfish dinner then gathered around the motel with the rest of the ST Cheap STOC folks. We had a very good rain storm roll in about 9pm and enjoyed seeing some rainfall for a change.
We left Camp Wood in the morning and I headed back home via Hwy 83 and Tomas, Ed, and Marco headed back to the BMW dealer in Boerne for their open house and the first viewing of the BMW K1600 GTL motorcycle. It's the new six cylinder motorcycle that's replacing the four cylinder LT. I owned a 2005 LT and it always seemed a little top heavy at parking lot speeds, but this new bike is suppose to have a much lower center of gravity and a dream to handle. We'll see in the future if that holds to be true. We'll have to make our way back to Alamo BMW for a test ride and another report. At-a-glance the bike looks great, sounds great, and has a seating height that allows someone like me at 5'10" with a 31" inseam to be flat footed on the ground.
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| The New BMW K1600 GTL |
