Yesterday I mentioned that I thought I might not be able to get vertical this morning after the unexpectedly severe pounding that the River Legacy Park Mountain Bike Trail administered to my delicate self on Friday.
Well, I suffered no aftereffects from yesterday's pounding. I think I had my longest swim of the swimming season this first Saturday morning of August.
Today I returned to the Tandy Hills today for the first time in awhile. A good cooling breeze was busy blowing, which made the HOT hill hiking pleasant. I'd forgotten how good one can feel after a good Tandy Hills steam bath.
My sister from Arizona was along for the hiking today. We had some relatively annoying subjects to discuss, some of which left me relatively annoyed.
Changing the subject from the Tandy Hills, and being relatively annoyed, to the park on the other side of the I-30 freeway.
Yesterday Don Young's August Prairie Notes arrived in my emailbox. I was enjoying reading the Prairie Notes when I came to Part 5) Death at Gateway Park. I was surprised when I got to the second paragraph of Part 5, to see what the first paragraph was leading up to.
I'll copy and paste Part 5 below in its entirety.....
5) Death at Gateway Park
Before Interstate-30 was created in 1957, the Tandy Hills expanded north all the way to the winding Trinity River and the heavily wooded riparian habitat that is now dotted with natural gas wells and adjacent to Gateway Park. Despite the busy highway and park facilities, a variety of wildlife still roams the area searching for food, water and shelter. Sometimes they come into contact with a brutal and dangerous predator known as, Homo Sapiens.
The blogger, Durango, recently reported finding a Nine-banded Armadillo shot to death at Gateway, apparently for the hell of it. This beautiful and mostly harmless animal is also the Official Texas State Small Animal. It angers me to see any member of our wildlife community, already stressed out by habitat destruction and fragmentation, slaughtered for sport. If you've got the stomach for it, Durango's blog report is here:
I Returned To Gateway Park Today & Mountain Biked To A Fort Worth Murder Scene
The latest Prairie Notes always eventually show up at this location, where you can read the entire Prairie Notes #68.
Changing the subject from Prairie Notes back to my sister in Arizona. My sister's eldest, he being my 3rd eldest nephew, is arriving in the D/FW zone on August 16. He will be here until August 20. He is in the D/FW zone in preparation for his best friend's wedding in September. Which means my nephew will be making a trip to Texas two months in a row.
Lewisville is where my nephew's best friend is located. I can not remember the last time I've been in Lewisville. My route, from here, to there, would take me through the under construction Grapevine Funnel remake, being remade into being, I think it is called, the D/FW Connector.
The D/FW Metroplex is not quite as easy to zip around in as is the Phoenix Metroplex. Which makes sense because the Phoenix area road system seems to be much more efficient than the D/FW area road system, which is sort of understandable, with the D/FW zone cramming 634 people into each square mile, while Phoenix is only cramming 252.9 people into each square mile.
These statistics may be a bit skewed due to the way metropolitan areas are measured. Something to do with the entire county a city sits in is counted in the metro area's size. Arizona has huge counties. Texas has small counties. Only two counties, Pinal and Maricopa, make up the Phoenix metro area, while 13 counties, Collin, Dallas, Delta, Denton, Ellis, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman, Palo Pinto, Parker, Rockwall, Tarrant and Wise county, make up the D/FW metro area.
The Phoenix metro area of those 2 counties is 16,573 square miles, much of it uninhabited.
The D/FW metro area of those 13 counties is 9,286 square miles, most of it inhabited and ill served by mass transit.
It will be a very daunting task for me to find my nephew in this densely populated part of the planet.
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