The bike/walking paths along Allen Parkway are a good place to start, and they are accessible from downtown. Just riding around downtown on a weekend morning (much less traffic) is fun. There’s also some bike paths along Braes bayou – you can take them all the way from the UH main campus to the southwest corner of the loop. Memorial park has some singletrack MTB trails and a picnic loop that a lot of people ride. The weather should be great this weekend, hope you can get out and enjoy it.
I mostly ride a road bike – that requires getting out of town to get away from some of the traffic and potholes. So I’m not the best source for routes in town.
Sounds like you want to do some urban riding. This site has some links/maps to bike paths around town:
http://www.publicworks.cityofhouston...ways/index.htm Any bike shop should also have some suggestions.
Once you have some miles in your legs, check out this ride:
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/81...dedetails.html
It’s 33 miles, the pace is leisurely (with plenty of breaks), and I thought the route offered some very interesting urban scenery...