Saturday, January 21st, 2006 - San Antonio Volksmarch.

Our goal for the day was to walk a Volksmarch in downtown San Antonio, and we drove into the city to do that. Luckily we found a YMCA across the street from the starting point at the Clarion Inn on the corner of St. Mary and Lexington streets where we could not only park all day for a $1 token but also find much appreciated bathrooms. We joined the San Antonio Riverwalk a block from the starting point and followed it south through the downtown area for about 4 kilometers. For most of that distance the Riverwalk was nicely landscaped with plants and mosaics. I was surprised to find out that the Riverwalk had been conceived as early as 1929 and built by the Works Progress Administration, another one of FDR's bright ideas, in 1935. One old iron truss bridge, however, was even older than that, dating from the 1890s.

At the south end of the Riverwalk we turned around at a flourmill complex founded by Carl H. Guenther, a German immigrant, in 1851. He had built his house right next to the old mill, and fortunately it had been restored to its original 19th Century appearance. The lowest floor was being used as a restaurant, but the upper floors contained a gift shop and small museum. I was intrigued that the business had continued in the Guenther family for over 100 years and either two or three generations before being turned over to professional outside managers. It reminded me of the Anheiser Busch and S.C. Johnson companies where the families had successfully trained and recruited successive CEOs from the family members to preserve the company dynasties. The far more typical pattern, as I perceive it, is for the founder to build a company and for the children to either "cash out" or run the company back into the ground by mismanagement. It was interesting to see one more example where that pattern had been put off for 100 years, and I wondered exactly how the Guenther family did it.

From the Guenther house we worked our way back north through the historic part of San Antonio on some nicely shaded avenues. For part of our route, big stately mansions lined the street. They looked gorgeous, but I didn't see any signs offering tours so our curiosity about what they looked like inside had to remain unsatisfied.

Ultimately we rejoined the Riverwalk, which lead us back to the downtown area and the Alamo, the "Shrine of Texas Independence". The Alamo was, of course, a military defeat for the Texans in their war for independence, but that defeat helped motivate them to ultimately overcome the forces of Santa Anna and win political autonomy from Mexico. For a while Texas was an independent Republic, but inevitably it joined the USA as the westward political expansion of our nation inexorably rolled on. The Alamo hadn't changed at all since we had first visited it as a family about 20 years ago, and somehow it was comforting to see a piece of our history preserved like that.

We got rather turned around in the last part of the walk and had to take a short cut through the convention center to find the Riverwalk again. But after that we basically returned to the starting point on the Riverwalk, detouring off to see the local memorials for the Vietnam and Korean Wars in front of the Municipal Building. The sculpture for the Vietnam War, which showed one soldier apparently checking the pulse of his buddy who has just been shot, was particularly moving, but maybe that was just me. I'm probably one of the last people that care about those wars, and after my generation dies I fully expect that future generations will only know them as faint echoes like the way we today think about the Spanish-American War.

Finishing our walk we drove south until we reached Mission San Jose, one of the five missions set up during the Spanish colonial period. The Alamo was one such mission, but we were checking out a Volksbike event that would allow us to see the other four of them. We found out that the route mostly used a bicycle path along the San Antonio River and took with the registration materials and a map so that we could ride our bikes on it if time and weather allowed. When we checked out the actual mission, we found that at that moment it was being used to celebrate a big, presumably Catholic, wedding and they had the place appropriately lit up and decorated. It obviously was after the ceremony in the "picture taking" stage of the festivities, and it was just great to seeing everyone milling about so happy. The bride, of course, looked radiant as all brides do and the little flower boy and girl were just too cute for words.

On that upbeat note we drove back to camp where Monika cooked a nice dinner and we relaxed for the evening doing our usual computer tasks before heading off to bed.