Thursday, February 3rd, 2006 - Volksmarch in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Our new "Starting Point 2006" book listed a Volksmarch in Corpus Christi, so after breakfast we once again drove into town and searched along Water Street until we found the Ramada Inn that hosted the walk. This Volksmarch featured the promenade along Corpus Christi's waterfront and we walked along that for the next couple of hours. The harbor is huge, by the way, and even has the World War II carrier "Lexington" moored in one nook as a floating museum.

The first leg of the walk was north along the harbor until we reached "Heritage Park", a collection of old, historic houses from Corpus Christi's past. They were certainly graceful old things, and I expect it took quite a bit of careful work to move them to the park. One house had been converted to a historical museum, but I didn't dare stop because we only had 2 hours on the parking meter and a museum would have delayed us significantly.

Instead we turned back to the harbor, passing a theater and an art institute along the way, and then started a long trek south along the promenade. Some sections of it were closed for construction, but the completed sections were very nice indeed. Every half a mile or so was a curious cupola jutting out into the harbor a bit, and inside each one was a tidbit of history. The tale of 3 shipwreck survivors, who endured 6 years of slavery and then escaped and spent another 2 years walking down into Mexico to return to civilization, was particularly vivid.

Our route included some extensions out into the harbor, and on one of those we found a reconstructed Spanish caravel. That was a reconstructed version of Columbus's "Nina" and at the north end of the park we had apparently just missed seeing reconstructed versions of the "Pinta" and "Santa Maria". All three ships had re-enacted Columbus's historic voyage in the early 1990s and were now permanently moored at Corpus Christi.

At the south end of the promenade we found our checkpoint and made a 180-degree turn to start coming back to the finish point, but we hadn't reckoned on the weather. It was blazingly hot, summer-like weather and the trail, while very pretty, had almost no shade whatsoever. We were, as a consequence, hot and dehydrated by that point and when a Whattaburger hove into view, we jumped at the chance to buy a super-sized drink with plenty of ice.

Our re-hydration stop gave us the energy to finish the last part of the walk, getting back just before the meter expired. For any Gentle Reader tempted to also do the Corpus Christi walk, let me recommend a hopefully better strategy than ours: After signing up, try to find an unlimited parking space or pay for all day parking at one of the local lots. That way you can stop off and really enjoy several attractions on this walk. There was the heritage museum in one of the old houses at the beginning of the walk, a brand spanking new art museum, and a science museum just off that walk route that included the reconstructed Pinta and Santa Maria. As you can see, this walk could be easily extended into pretty much an all day expedition that would offer several different kinds of interesting and fun attractions.

Some necessary chores occupied our afternoon, so we didn't get back to camp until later that day, by which point the weather had changed markedly. A really stiff and gusty breeze blew up quite suddenly and the temperature, although still warm, dropped noticeably. We had left the windows open to help keep the trailer cool during the day, and when we arrived back at camp we found a fine layer of sand that had blown in through the windows and covered pretty much every flat surface with a fine, gritty layer. Monika cleaned off the table as best she could, but while we were having dinner we still felt the sand whenever we moved our plates, a curious grinding feeling. The wind also shook the trailer a bit although not as badly as the 70 mph winds at the Guadalupe Mountains during Wanderung 8. The shaking was similar to light turbulence in an airplane. We found we could ignore it while we did our evening reading, but the motion did make it a bit harder to get to sleep afterwards, somewhat like sleeping on a moving train.