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Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 - Volksmarch in Port Aransas, Texas.

After breakfast we drove up Padre Island to its northern end and crossed a small bridge onto Mustang Island, the next barrier island in the chain that stretches from South Padre Island to near Houston. The southern section of Mustang Island was partly a state park and partly just undeveloped land, but we saw more and more subdivisions in the dunes as we reached Port Aransas on the northern tip of the island. Monika had found two Volksmarches starting at the Tarpon Inn in Port Aransas, so we drove there to sign up and take a walk. The Tarpon Inn gave me a curious feeling of deja vu because its elegant two-story frame structure with a wide wooden veranda on the first floor was reminiscent of the 1920s-era resort houses I had seen in Key West during Wanderung 1. We found out that the inn had been constructed in the 1920s when apparently the town of Port Aransas was some kind of local resort, so the resemblance to the old Key West homes was probably more than coincidence.

Our walk route took us first over to the ferry and marina area. The short gap between Port Aransas and the next island in the chain is spanned by a set of small ferries that regularly chug to and fro. I'm sure that a bridge at that point would serve far more people and be much cheaper than the 200 million dollar plus "Bridge to Nowhere" that Senator Ted Stevens got the funds to build in Alaska. It doesn't seem fair somehow, but politics is a peculiar game with no real rules, so I expect the 15 people on that island in Alaska will get their gold-plated gazillion dollar bridge while the thousands of folks needing a bridge at Port Aransas will just have to make do with the ferries. As I think Will Rogers once put it, we have "the best Congress money can buy!"

Across the channel we saw a medium-sized passenger ship called the "Texas Treasure" (registered in Nassau, the Bahamas, of course). It didn't look like a ferry and it was too small to be a normal cruise ship, so my best guess was that it was one of those floating casinos. Sure enough, we later saw billboards advertising the daily gambling trips. Every afternoon and evening the ship apparently steams out of the harbor just far enough to travel beyond the 12-mile limit so that the casino can legally operate.

The next stop on our walk was a small bird sanctuary right next to a sewage treatment plant on the edge of town. We took a walk out in the marsh on the boardwalk and really did see a lot of birds. For the most part they were waterfowl like the Northern Shovel (according to my informant there is not, however, a Southern Shovel), pelicans, coots, and such like. If you are interested in more professional pictures of the birds in that area, you might try the website of Dwight Sokoll at dsokoll.homestead.com because he apparently visits the area at different times of the year to get good pictures of our feathered friends.

Despite warning signs for alligators I did not catch a glimpse of any on our walk, which was disappointing. But to make up for that the sponsors of the bird sanctuary had also installed a rather extensive garden of tropical plants along the fence. Almost all the plants were carefully labeled, which was a real boon to someone like myself who really can't tell the players without a scorecard. Unfortunately we were there in the relatively dormant season that passes for winter in coastal Texas, so very few of the plants had flowers. Still, it was good to see that something like "pencil cactus" had green stems that really did resemble pencils, reminding me that some things at least, unlike politicians, believe in truth in advertising.


 

Retracing our steps from the bird sanctuary we cut across the outer edge of town over to the beach. That edge of town was pretty obviously the newly developed side and came complete with the garishly painted and outlandishly decorated stores selling T shirts and tourist gewgaws. To be fair, however, Port Aransas had only a couple of such stores rather than the 22 we counted on South Padre Island, so the relaxed ambiance of the old resort town is still discernable, which is nice.

At the beach we curled back into town by way of the harbor inlet and ended up back at the Tarpon Inn. The 11 kilometer walk had taken us 2.5 hours, which was a bit slow, but we had also added the walk out on the boardwalk at the bird sanctuary to the usual route. I was happy that I only started getting tired at the 2-hour point rather than after barely an hour as had happened during our earlier walk in Denton Texas, and it appeared that we were slowly getting into somewhat better condition. Still, we were tired and quite hungry after the walk, so we had lunch at the Whattaburger and desert at the Dairy Queen right next door to it--convenient, that.

On our way back to camp we stopped off to have one of our propane tanks refilled at a local RV park that offered that service, and back at camp I reinstalled it so that we once again had a full bottle of propane as a backup. After resting a bit we took a couple of garbage bags and walked north on the beach picking up man-made trash. Most of it was plastic bags, bottles, and chunks of Styrofoam that had been brought in by the tide, and it was rather amazing how quickly we filled our trash bags.

After getting our exercise and doing our good deed for the day, we rewarded ourselves with some junk food snacks and settled in for a comfortable evening in the trailer before once again turning in as night fell.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 06
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February 2006
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