It was the summer of '96, a small group of us decided to ride our motorcycles to Big Bend for a few days. The trip was planned over a month in advance to let it cool down. We decided that the end of September would be a good time to make the 450 mile ride. Little did we know the adventure ahead of us. I was the newest rider in the group, I still had my first new bike. The 1994 Kawasaki EX500 , a beginner bike, is only 500cc and 50 horsepower. It was a lot smaller than the 1000cc, 100+ horsepower motorcycles I was riding with. I had 2 years of experience on this motorcycle, putting over 12,000 miles riding around Central Texas.
A few days before the trip my bike started running funny. I thought I fixed the problem. I was wrong. The day of the trip my bike wouldn't start. I was really lucky, my friends stuck around for the motorcycle shop to open and repair the bike. We originally planned to take a lot of back roads through the hill country. A 3 hour late start and news of an unexpected storm changed our plans. We still took a lot of back roads, we really didn't want to ride for over 300 miles on IH35...can you say boring? Remember that unexpected storm? I know I'll never forget it. We found out later that the weather radar had most of the area covered in red. For the most part we were actually staying fairly dry. The rain gear I bought that morning was working!
We were crawling along in the heavy rain on a small 2 lane back road with a lot of water crossings. I'll give you 3 tries to guess what happened. heavy rain + low water crossing = turn around now. The rushing water on the road persuaded us to turn around. By that point enough rain had come down to cause flash flooding. We stopped at the next low water crossing. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere unless one of us tried to go through it. I was the lucky one to volunteer. I went slow and lifted my feet up, the water was above the foot pegs. Everything was going pretty well until a truck came by. The first traffic we saw on this road and it comes when I'm stuck in a low water crossing. A wall of water came crashing down on me, whatever was dry before was no longer. I was soaked! At that point I stopped caring about trying to keep any part of me dry. We had to cross 2 more low water crossings before finally coming to a road that would get us to a town.
After a very long day we finally made it to where we were staying at midnight. The next day we woke up to a record cold temperature with a beautiful view. The "lodge", right next to the border, was almost an hour away ride from a gas station that sold clothes. We all bought sweat shirts which helped. I also had 2 pairs of jeans on and 2 pairs of gloves on. Luckily, that was the end of the bad times. Other than being a little cold in the mornings, the rest of the trip was absolutely spectacular. Here's a picture of my friend's motorcycles, mine was the red one on the far right. Big Bend is beautiful, the scenery is gorgeous and there was a surprising number of curvy roads.
On the 4th day we headed back home. The trip back home was uneventful. We all made it home with no tickets or accidents. Gotta love that!

For some reason I could only find one other person to go with me. This year I had a new motorcycle, a 1994 Suzuki RF900R. It had nearly twice the engine size and over twice the power as my other bike. I couldn't wait to ride on the open roads in Big Bend. The trip to Big Bend was uneventful. Other than riding a lot we took a few pictures. Here's a picture of the motorcycles, mine was the one on the left.
On the trip back home we ran into a little rain. Actually, it was a lot of rain. We were luckily on 290 when the rain started. I later found the radar was showing red in the area we were in. It took a while but we finally made it out of the worse part and were able to stay ahead of it. Other than the flashbacks from the previous year's storm, everything was great.