Biking through Houston with the mayor

For a while, I thought I was something special, bicycling through the nearly deserted streets of Houston, Texas, with the mayor as my tour guide. Then, I found out that people ride with the mayor all the time.

My excursion was with a convention group, and Mayor Bill White wanted to show the visitors that Houston can be a bicycle-friendly place. For the record, he´s a fine tour guide.

Our ride started before dawn at a new city park called Discovery Green. Sunrise found us gliding through Glenwood Cemetery, where Howard Hughes continues his reclusive ways, and we stopped at the Beer Can House for coffee and kolaches (little pastries of Czech origin with cheese or sausage) before most Houston office workers got to their downtown towers.

The Beer Can House, which doesn´t normally offer coffee and kolaches, is one of Houston´s folk-art oddities. This tidy bungalow in a thriving downtown neighborhood is made famous because it´s covered with flattened beer cans and accented with tendrils of pull tabs and can tops that tinkle in the wind. The folk-artist responsible was a retiree, who really, really liked beer and who had lots and lots of time on his hands.

With or without the mayor, sprawling Houston, the fourth largest American city, actually is rather welcoming to bicyclists.

Dan Raine, who has the cool job title of bicyclist/pedestrian specialist for the city, reports that Houston has 284 miles of bikeways and that 42 miles of new bike trails are anticipated in the next two years.

There´s an active community of cyclists (check out www.BikeHouston.org), loads of bicycle shops and a solid calendar of organized rides. Among them:

Most Thursday mornings, Mayor White wheels through Memorial Park, and fellow riders are welcome to join him. It´s not a big, orchestrated event, just part of the mayor´s regular exercise program.

For contrast, consider the Tour de Houston, which the mayor helped start. It´s on a Sunday in March every year and attracts more than 5,000 riders for loops of 20 and 40 miles capped off by a party at City Hall in Hermann Square.

A somewhat smaller gig occurs every October on the weekend closest to the full moon. It´s the 20-mile Moonlight Ramble, a tradition almost four decades old that has the unlikely start time of 2 a.m. It´s especially fun when the full moon is near Halloween because riders are encouraged to come in costume.

Houston also is the starting point for the BP MS150 in April, a fundraising 150-mile jaunt through the Texas Hill Country to Austin for more than 13,000 riders. Dan Raine says it´s the biggest two-day bike ride in the country.

If you´re a Houston visitor and want some saddle time, there´s a list of bicycle shops at www.BikeHouston.org. One location to check for rentals is I Cycle, and you also might check at the various locations of Sun & Ski (a national firm headquartered in Houston).