22 March 2023, Houston, USA –

We’re very aware that this blog is meant to chronicle our orienteering adventures, and that so far on this trip, after 6.5 weeks, we’ve done precisely no orienteering.  Mostly because of a lack of suitable terrain, unless you fancy thickly vegetated swamps with no contour features but many alligators.  There are clubs in both Florida and Texas, but they don’t hold events very often.  Urban orienteering doesn’t seem to have taken hold in this part of the US – yet there are plenty of suitable places for it.

So to tick off the US as a country in which we’ve orienteered, I managed to dig up a permanent course map, comprising Hermann Park and Rice University, close to downtown Houston.  There is a large green park, a well known zoo, a golf course with lots of “keep off” signs, a large university campus, and a medical/hospital district.  Sound familiar?  Rather like Royal Park/Parkville/Melbourne Uni, the route choices are determined mostly by the out of bounds areas.  Nevertheless we had a map, control features, and questions to be answered.  It is not on MapRun so we took photos of each answer, to verify later (all correct).

If you want to follow along, we did not start at the start triangle, because the car park there was overflowing.  So we began at no 2,  Our route from there was 16-15-3-20-19-1-4-8-9-12-13-14-11-7-6.  Our free parking ran out after than so we dropped 5, 18, 17 and 10. Click here to see the map

We were not racing, or even running.  We combined the course with a chance to sightsee in this lovely green space, and to meander through the campus of Rice University.  We even ate lunch on the way.  Control 11 was an outlier, but we were keen to see the site where John F Kennedy gave his famous “We Choose To Go To The Moon” speech in September 1962.  It took us about 2.5 hours at our leisurely pace, although we did pick up the pace about halfway through.

The first few controls took us past statues, monuments and ornamental lakes, as well as to an outdoor sound shell on a grassy slope – think The Tan and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.  We reluctantly forewent to chance to ride a pedalo boat or take the miniature railway.  Between controls 19 and 1, we were restricted to a gravel path through the golf course – think Royal Park or East Malvern.  Here we met numerous ducks, of types I’ve never seen; and the squirrels which inhabit most parks where there are people and food.

En route to controls 8 and 4, we felt we’d transported ourselves to Moonee Ponds Creek.  After control 9, we made our way through a district full of medical research facilities – not unlike Parkville, but with bigger and shinier glass towers.

Crossing two busy roads, we were now in the Rice University campus, which covers 300 acres.  It’s a pity there aren’t more controls in here; it’s possibly too open to make a really tricky sprint map, but it is full of gorgeous spreading trees (there are 4000 of them) forming long shady avenues, and Italianate buildings with colonnades, ornamental brick facades, and even turrets and Juliet balconies.  We were able to see the football field where the aforementioned speech was delivered. Rice has always had, and continues to have, close links to NASA.

The great thing about being able to pick up an orienteering map is that it takes you to places which you might not otherwise visit.  This part of Houston was completely different from the urban sprawl and the freeway jungle that we’ve seen to date, and it was an enjoyable walk (and some much needed exercise).