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That ours is a city of many gas stations, nail salons, cell phone boutiques, and chain drug stores is well known to even the most casual of Houston explorers, be they afoot or aboard an automobile.

Other aspects are revealed only to the most dedicated of adventurers, a category in which, if I may be so bold, I would place David Beebe and myself. After all, we have by now walked something close to 150 miles of Houston sidewalks covering every corner of the metropolis, from the Fifth Ward to Alief, the Pasadena Area to the far side of Spring Branch.

A couple of weeks ago David Beebe and I and special guest Sole-r Sam Smith attempted an overly bold trek from the Brazoria County Line all the way up South Post Oak to Willowbend, from whence we intended to continue hiking on to South Main and thence downtown, to Allen’s Landing.

We didn’t make it.

For two reasons: one, it was too hot. The heat index had to be about 107 degrees, at least.

Number two, the prospect of slogging up South Main through that sterile low-end big box retail zone around the Astrodome, and then through the equally bland Med Center, somehow failed to enchant us after 12 miles in the scorching sun.

So this trip ended up as little more than a Bataan death pub crawl, taking in three unjustly obscure near southwest side strip mall taverns.

Did you know Google Maps has now added walking directions? It seems to work pretty well for strictly local trips.

For example, I asked it for the best way to walk from my house near the Palace Lanes on Bellaire Boulevard to my office here at the Press downtown, and it suggested that I head up to University and then Fannin, which is a pretty decent route. It also estimated that the trip would take about two-and-a-half hours, which is about right, unless I stop in some pubs.

But then I got to wondering…Let’s just say I wanted to walk to San Antonio. Google Maps comes up with a route that seems to carry you down the I-10 feeder road for much of the journey, and then claims that the estimated time is a hair under three days. I don’t think even the Pony Express could match that time.

Looks like David Beebe and my expose on the epidemic of stray shopping carts is bearing fruit. Here’s what the Chronicle says H.P.D. is doing about the problem:

“’There are more shopping carts than bushes out there,’ said Lt. Richard Zajac of the Houston Police Department's South Central Patrol Division, which this year launched a special detail to curb cart theft in hopes of stopping more serious crime.

Eight a.m. to noon, The trip out, and in from Mission Bend to Westchase: David Beebe and I like to think we are great urban adventurers, veterans of what is now over 130 miles of walking the city streets, and many hundreds more miles logged on the city buses. In other words, this shit ain’t exactly new to us. But in our most recent installment of the Sole of Houston, we acted like a couple of noobs.

The plan was to meet at my house near the Palace Lanes on Bellaire and walk down to Stella Link, catch the southbound #68 bus and head out to the West Loop Transit Center near Meyerland, and then transfer to the #33 South Post Oak bus, which would deliver us out to Hiram Clarke Park and Ride. We would walk back in from there all the way to Allen’s Landing and our customary two Martini celebration at Warren’s.

Beebe arrived at the house about eight a.m., clutching a hilarious campaign poster for his bid for Marfa City Council. It was a very nice day, absolutely the best weather we’ve had for one of these walks – mid-60s, low humidity, not a hint of rain.

We decided to walk down to the West Loop Transit Center, so we headed down Academy to Brays Bayou and followed it as it wound its way southwest.

The #33 bus arrived almost immediately after we made it to the George R. Brown-looking transit center. “Perfect timing,” Beebe said. We lined up to get on and Beebe’s face sank. “Man, I can’t believe I did this,” he said. “I’ve got like $90, but the smallest I have is a ten. I’m gonna have to pay ten bucks for the bus.”

This week, David Beebe and I tackled Richmond, from the Mission Bend Park and Ride to the Wheeler Station on the light rail.

I’ll have the full story up in a few minutes, but here’s a little something to whet your appetite.

Richmond Ave, by the numbers

Bars stopped in: 6

Dangerous wild animals seen: 1 (Well, we think we saw a cottonmouth in a drainage ditch.)

Stray shopping carts: about 30 (an all-time record, we believe)

Just a quick note to steer Sole readers over to David Beebe’s belated if totally awesome write-ups of the Broadway / Harrisburg jaunt here and here. – John Nova Lomax

Something about the east side of our fair city keeps drawing the Sole of Houston back. Even after already hiking Clinton / Navigation and Telephone / Griggs / OST, David Beebe and I decided we needed at least one more trek over there.

Houston’s east side brings to mind Nelson Algren’s famous quote on Chicago: “Once you've come to be a part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

Here’s the east Houston equivalent: “…You may well find uglier uglies. But never an ugly so trill.”

And in truth, it’s not even as ugly as parts of the West Side. The Gulfton Ghetto is uglier than its Broadway equivalent, as we would find out. The far reaches of Westheimer have nothing on honky-tonking semi-rural Almeda-Genoa.

After the usual Internet planning session, Beebe and I decided to meet at the Med Center Transit Center, where we would catch the last Park and Ride bus of the morning out to South Point and hike in from there.

In our most ill-advised jaunt yet, David Beebe and I chose to walk Long Point in from the Beltway to the Hempstead Highway, and then turn southeast there to Washington, and then trek the rapidly douchifying street of dreams in to Warren’s downtown.

On paper, it didn’t seem like such a bad plan. As the crow flies, it was only about 12 miles, and Spring Branch is not a particularly dangerous neighborhood. What’s more, I was raised in the Museum District and went to high school at Jesuit in Sharpstown, so my orientation has always been toward the Inner Loop, the southwest and the west. I know a little something about Memorial, but I had literally never even driven a block down any of The Branch’s main east-west arteries. After our walk, I am still unable to tell you what the southern equivalents of Bingle, Wirt and Campbell are. In a way, this was like an out-of-town trip for me.

This would be a milk run, a breeze, as the Brits put it, a piece of piss.

Hardly. Literally the first thing I heard on waking the morning of the walk was KUHF’s weatherman reading the forecast: “It’s currently 46 degrees, and that’s about as warm as it’s gonna get. Forecasters are calling for a 90 percent chance of rain, so it’s a good day to just stay inside.”

I looked at the window and took in the rain-slicked bricks of our patio, glistening in the pre-dawn gloom. Hell, not only did it look like pure misery out there, but I was on deadline for a feature story. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to take a rain check? Weren’t days like today the reason they were called rain checks, anyway?

Nope. Not a chance. The Sole of Houston is like the United States Postal Service: Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

This installment of the Sole of Houston takes us to the Southeast side of town.

There were a lot of firsts to this walk. For starters, it was the first that had a theme – since it took us through Rory Miggins’s old stomping grounds, we dedicated the walk to him. The temperature was cooler than on any other walk, and this Monday hike was the first I’d ever done on any day other than Friday or Saturday. And there was another big one, a huge psychological step, but I’ll get to that as it comes…

9 AM, the Pierce Elevated at Travis

The original plan was to take the Fuqua park and ride bus from Downtown Transit Center out to Fuqua, walk west on Fuqua to Telephone, and then head north on that storied road to the Leeland split. From there we would head west on Leeland downtown, and then on to Warren’s, one of the traditional termini for these trips.

But after an hour or so, we got tired of waiting for the bus. We decided to just take off on foot, so we walked up to Leeland and headed east. We would decide where to turn around and head back later.

In this episode of the Sole of Houston, David Beebe and I selected Bissonnet. We would catch the #65 bus at Bellaire transit center, ride it out to Synott Road, about 14.5 miles southwest of our intended terminus – Ernie’s on Banks, a few blocks north of Bissonnet off Montrose. After gathering provisions at the downtown Bellaire Walgreen’s, we rode the 65 an hour to the southwest.

10:06 AM, 14000 Bissonnet: Out here near Synott, only a couple of miles due north of Sugar Land, Bissonnet reminded me of Westheimer’s outer reaches -- scattered apartment complexes amid brushy vacant lots. A sign in one such announced the future home of “Timmy Chan’s Retail Center” – the late ghetto grub kingpin’s heirs are evidently continuing the march of his empire.

10:34 AM, 12715 Bissonnet, Stumpy’s Bar: Despite the time, Stumpy’s was open. Despite the fact that we had walked only about a mile, it was time for a beer.

As we walked in, I could hear an old guy saying to his friends “If stupidity had o’ been a crime, that place woulda been a penitentiary,” to general guffaws. The median age of the three codgers at the bar – the only customers -- had to be about 70, while the barmaid was probably in her mid 50s.

A silence fell over the men as we took our place at the bar. We each ordered Busch tall boys. Despite prominent “No Smoking” signs in Spanish and English, each stool at the bar had a ripped-in-half beer can stuffed with butts in front of it.

There were three tables in Stumpy’s, each salvaged from a Wendy’s circa 1979. (You remember those tables with the Victorian newspapers on them, right?) A TV beamed the bed-hopping shenanigans of The Young and the Restless to Stumpy’s regulars, while a snack machine in the corner offered not just Cheez-Its and Snickers but also condoms, rolling papers and Alka-Seltzer. The men’s room was the final resting place of a couple of gutted Golden Age video games.

Last week John Nova Lomax and David Beebe took off on another cross-Houston adventure. Click here for a map. You can read about Lomax's previous urban hikes here and here and here.

David Beebe and I intended to start this hike in “downtown” Pearland and proceed forth on what is called North Main street there, then Highway 35, and at last Telephone Road. We would then walk that fabled street of song and sordid vice until its end in Eastwood, near the corner of Fashion Street.

Such, however, was not to be. There are no buses down Telephone much past the Loop, still less down to Hobby Airport or Pearland. (People in the southeastern ‘burbs seem to believe in the idea that crime follows bus routes; there are fewer lines in the direction than any other.)

After scrapping a couple of alternate routes, Beebe and I settled on a 5th Ward / East Side plan: we would ride the #30 Clinton bus to wherever it ended beyond the East Loop and walk back in.

That scheme would melt like Laffy Taffy in the tropical sun of that miasmic day.

Another month, another long-ass Houston street to conquer. This month, David Beebe joined me again, and the river of concrete we decided to take on was Bellaire Boulevard. We would commence at the Mission Bend Park and Ride just west of Highway 6 and head back down to Little Woodrow’s IceHouse, a stone’s throw from my house where Houston, Bellaire, South Side Place and West U converge in a mad jumble of sprouting McMansions and hypervigilant police jurisdictions. After all, east of Little Woodrow’s, Bellaire/Holcombe is pretty tedious, so there would be no point in walking past the last beer just so we could get to the Med Center.

All photos by John Nova Lomax and David Bebee.

To read The Shepherd Stroll, Part I, click here.
To read The Shepherd Stroll, Part II, click here.

Did we mention something about used car lots? South of the Loop and north of the Katy, Shepherd is composed of little else. Those sparkly, tasseled strings that overhang you there whisper in the wind, making this stretch of Shepherd sound something like an autumn walk in the woods. But you're far more likely to find lemons here than lemon trees.

John Lomax and David Bebee finish their Shepherd Stroll after the jump ...