2017-01-22 31 -97

Location

Right lane of eastbound US-190 (now I-14) near Harker Heights, Bell County, Texas, US.

Participants

Thunk (talk), Thunk's dad.

Plans

This is the easy Speed Racer, in fact. -- Thunk (talk) 17:26, 22 January 2017 (GMT+00:00)

The plan was to drive there and back. Also get Tron. Simple. ?

Expedition

Surprise breakfast happened, then I left with my dragalong driving the vehicle. However, an additional complication ensued as we had a third person who needed to be dropped off at their house. Since they lived in a cul-de-sac, this would ordinarily have precluded the Tron achievement. No matter; it turns out you can ensure horizontal separation by holding your GPS device out of the car window.

Anyway, the dropoff occurred, and it was off to the hashpoint. Since my family ordinarily sees little point in hashing, upon arrival in Killeen we decided to examine whether the city had an interesting downtown. The answer was in the negative.

Then, it was off to US-190; eight km west of the hashpoint, we got on the freeway, and accelerated to the speed limit at the point, 75 mph (which was slightly higher than the speed limit there, but well below the speed of overtaking traffic.) A truck in front worried us, but it was easy to temporarily slow down and accelerate so that the speed could be maintained through the point itself.

We finally missed the turn home, and using the frontage roads was out of the question as it would entail path-crossing. No matter; local roads 10 km to the east allowed a crossing of the Leon River. Afterwards, arriving back at our starting point (4 hours later) was easy.