Bike Riding With Theo To Fort Nisqually In Tacoma's Point Defiance Park

Today is the first day since my bike was stolen which has the outer world warm enough that I would have gone on a bike ride today, if I still had a pair of rolling wheels.

Just when I was finding myself feeling just a little melancholy in came some pictures from Tacoma which quickly had me having a bout of feeling homesick.

Apparently today Theo took Mama Kristin to Tacoma's Point Defiance Park to ride their bikes during the weekly Saturday closed to cars period.

Point Defiance Park is enormous. One of the biggest city parks in the world. In Point Defiance Park's 760 acres you will find "Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, the Rose Garden, Rhododendron Garden, beaches, trails, a boardwalk, a boathouse, a Washington State Ferries ferry dock for the Point Defiance-Tahlequah route to Vashon Island, Fort Nisqually, an off-leash dog park, and most notably a stand of old-growth forest."

All in quotation marks and in italics in the above paragraph was from the Wikipedia article about Point Defiance Park.

Also from the Wikipedia article, "Portions of The Five Mile Drive are closed to cars on Saturday. There are many hiking trails along Pt. Defiance's cliffs, that have sweeping views of Vashon Island, Dalco Passage, Gig Harbor, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The road network also passes by Fort Nisqually."

In the imaginary world class Texas city I lived in prior to moving to Wichita Falls there was nary a single city park worthy of a Wikipedia article. That town was named after a fort, which was actually a camp, made up of tents, eventually designated as a fort, even though there was no fortress of the sort one thinks of when one sees the "fort" word.

Fort Nisqually in Tacoma, in Point Defiance Park, is a classic frontier fort of the fort stereotype sort. You know, a wood stockade surrounding a fortified area. Just Googled to find there is an extensive Wikipedia article about Fort Nisqually.

Now that is sort of ironic, there is no Wikipedia article about Fort Worth, the fort, from whence the town got its name, it being a town named after a fort where there is no longer any semblance of a fort.

However, there is a run down boarded up eyesore of a park, called Heritage Park, which pays homage to Fort Worth's fort heritage, in the north end of that world class town's downtown, on a bluff overlooking the location of America's Biggest Boondoggle.

Above that is Theo riding along surrounded by some of that old growth forest mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Point Defiance Park. Being in a forest of tall old growth trees is soothing. And it smells real good.

In the photo at the top Theo is stopped at a point along one of those cliffs also mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Vashon Island is also mentioned. I think that is Vashon Island in the distance behind Theo. For those in Fort Worth not familiar with the concept. An island is a chunk of land surrounded by a large body of water. In the case of Vashon Island, it is surrounded by the south end of Puget Sound, which is an inlet of this really big body of water called the Pacific Ocean.

Digging a ditch around a chunk of urban wasteland and then filling that ditch with dirty water does not an island make. Of course there is no law forbidding someone from calling such a chunk of land an island, but doing so just opens a town up to being laughed at, ridiculed and makes ones town appear to be, well, a clueless backwards backwater that is certainly not world class...