Monday, January 23rd, 2006 - The missions of San Antonio, Texas.

The clouds grudgingly gave way to a sunny sky in the morning, so we decided to stay an extra day and do the Volksbike event along the San Antonio River. Parking the truck at Mission San Jose, we unloaded the bicycles and headed north on the bike trail to Mission Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion. Although the trail was really quite flat, a strong, cold headwind made the first leg almost like a constant uphill ride, so I was tired and ready for a rest when we rode onto the grounds of Mission Concepcion.

Mission Concepcion had been converted to a parish church at the end of the Spanish Colonial era and was in a fairly good state of repair. It seemed like a smaller church than Mission San Jose, but the interior was definitely darker and that may have thrown off my estimates. One of the adjoining convent rooms had parts of the original wall frescoes intact, and I enjoyed seeing those. We bought some post cards at the Ranger station for the folks back home and remounted our bikes to ride back south.

As I had hoped, riding south we had a tailwind and that made all the difference in the world. Retracing our route we whizzed back past Mission San Jose and kept heading south. In Acequia Park we found some remains of the irrigation system constructed by the Friars over 200 years ago, which was rather amazing. On our way we saw a hawk like bird with white head and white on its wings amongst a bunch of vulture. We later learned it was a Caracara, a lazy raptor that prefers stealing its meals from the vultures.

To get to Mission San Juan Capistrano we had to detour east on Ashley Road about a half a mile, and that was the only time during the entire day that we were forced to ride on the shoulder of a road and contend directly with the traffic. We entered the Mission grounds and saw a set of three bells that surmounted the entrance to the mission church. In Spanish colonial days, the bells were used to strictly control the cycle of daily work of the mission Indians.

Continuing south we finally arrived at the end of the bike trail and our last mission, Mission San Francisco de la Espada. The mission church really was surprisingly small. The historical plaques informed us that that the friars had just put in the foundations for a new and much larger church when a plague of some kind reduced the Indian population so much that the project was abandoned. Hard to build a big church without sufficient slave labor, I guess. Nevertheless, I found the old church to be a quite cozy and attractive. The adjacent cloister was fronted by a pretty flower garden with some flowers blooming in the mild Texas winter. Almost all of the outbuildings were fallen into ruin, of course, but even the ruins were picturesque and we took some time for some pictures before we turned our bicycles back north.

We were biking the last few of the 16 miles of the Volksbike at that point and once again heading into a wind, but by that time in the afternoon it had already warmed up enough that the wind did not give us a chill. Still, the pedaling was harder but we finally made it back to Mission San Jose, where I stowed our bicycles in the truck while Monika stamped our books.

We didn't find anyplace to eat lunch along the way, but each mission had a nice set of bathrooms (courtesy of the National Park Service, I think) and that encouraged us to take our time when we stopped. One curious thing during our 4-hour bicycle ride was how friendly people were to us. Four out of five of the local folks we met on the trail spontaneously started up a conversation with us, and that is pretty unusual. In fact, thinking back on it, the only similar experience we had a similar experience was in North Dakota during Wanderung 6. I had to wonder if these pockets of extremely friendly people really existed or if it was just coincidence, but if it is real it would be an important factor in choosing a place to live, in my opinion.

After the walk we continued to try to find lunch, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult as the Interstate 410 loop around the south side of San Antonio had very little to offer. But finally on the west side of town we found a Subway in a Valero gasoline station where we bought a couple of sandwiches. By this time the weather was so fine that we sat outside to eat and our al fresco luncheon was very pleasant. After lunch we crossed the street to a local library where we signed onto the Internet for an hour to check our email and send greetings to our kith and kin. Returning to the trailer we settled in to work on our computers for a bit and since we already had the TV hooked up, we even watched the evening news broadcast on CBS and international news on the BBC. In a way it was nice to be back in contact with the world, but on the other hand it was more of the same old, same old refrains of economic problems, political problems, and social problems, which quickly became depressing. Sigh.

Since we planned to leave the next morning, later that evening I repacked the bed of the pickup truck so that everything fit a bit more gracefully. To round off the evening we started the next novel in Anne Perry's Inspector Monk series, "The Sins of the Wolf", and I must say it was good to be reading a series of novels in the correct order, for a change. The development of the two major characters in each book made a lot more sense that way, and the way the character was at the end of each novel was the way we would find them at the beginning of the next one, which was a comforting continuity. In any event it kept us entertained until it was time for bed.