Posted on

Trip19

A quiet day. A catch-up day. No birding. Watched both games yesterday. Our record is still perfect. No team we have rooted for has advanced. We’ll let you know when we pick a favorite for the Superbowl so you’ll know where to put your money. We haven’t tried to drag the Jeep sideways for over a week now, and we’re close to Corpus Christi, so we thought we’d go ahead and replace the worn front tires. Judy got the names and addresses of the larger tire stores in Corpus Christi, and I put the addresses into the Navigator to find out which was closest and most convenient for us. It worked. We prioritized the list. We called the best one. Then we called another. And another. And another. With all the tire sizes available, why would Jeep have to go and invent a new one? None of the existing ones already invented would work? I don’t think so. Apparently our 2002 Jeep is still new enough, that the round of tire replacements has not begun. Basically, we’re driving on tires that no one has ever heard of, except for Jeep designers of course. We decided the front tires are just fine until we get home. Then our local tire shop can order them for us. We struck out with that effort, but the oatmeal and coffee while sitting in our sunny front window went well. We signed up for a couple more nights here. I messed with the water pump and some fittings. Judy did some laundry. Called the office to see if Jamie needed to send anything to us here to sign. Had lunch. Watched the northern shovelers, cormorant, killdeer, and snipe in the pond in front of us. We don’t get to see snipe very often. Decided to go find Dovie. We find Dovie every year. Judy has a couple shirts hand painted by Dovie. Egrets, pelicans, spoonbills, that sort of thing. Most every year, Dovie is not at the shop in Rockport we found her at the year before. We always find her, though. Sometimes we find her at her house. This year we found her at “4 the Birds”. We drove to Port Aransas. Struggled through a 20 minute ferry wait by watching smooth gray bottlenose dolphins rolling through the water. And pelicans. But this is not a birding day so we didn’t look at the pelicans very much. These are sixteen car ferryboats. Two rows of four cars each on either side on the control tower(Bridge?). The part that holds the ferryboat driver, anyway. On the way down from Galveston, we crossed this ferry with the Bounder. Towing. They put us on one side of the ferry, along with one other car. Eight cars on one side, the Bounder, Jeep, and a pickup truck on the other. So. One Bounder = six cars. We drove on. We were headed for Rockport. It wasn’t a birding day, so we didn’t slow down as we passed the kingfishers, cormorants, and ducks. There were probably some ducks in there we hadn’t seen yet, but we were focused. Driven. Judy visited with Dovie. I got to run around the marina. Dovie agreed to make a couple things for Judy. We’ll pick them up at the end of the week. We drove on. We took a walk around the Rockport Art Center. We looked for our brick. I sent them money and they agreed to put a brick in the walk for us. We never found the brick. They were closed today, so we couldn’t ask them where to look. We drove around the marina and wrote down the phone numbers of some birding tours. They run tours by boat over to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge to see the wintering whooping cranes. It’s not just about whooping cranes, even though that would be reason enough. They put an ornithologist on the boat and he’ll point out fifty species of birds or so on the trip. We’ve done it a few times before. It’s always an interesting trip. We decided to drive up to Goose Island State Park to take a look. We’ll probably move to there next, but we drove up there anyway. We didn’t stop to look at the ducks in the Bay, because this is not a birding day. Well, we did stop to look at the cormorant, because he didn’t look quite right. In the Binocs, he turned out to be a loon. Cool. We drove on. Passing the Aransas Bay park, Judy told me to turn the car around and go back. We were in construction traffic, so that took some doing. Eventually we did get back to where she had spotted…… The Swan. There are no swans here, so it made no sense at all for a swan to be in the bay, but there it was, The Swan. It was not a Trumpeter Swan. We’ve seen them. It was not a Tundra Swan. We’ve seen them. We looked in the book. It was a Mute Swan. It is not supposed to be here, but there it was. Unmistakable. An adult Mute Swan. A new bird for us. A pretty good score for a day when we’re not even birding. We watched it for a while, then moved on. To Goose Island. We cruised out onto the peninsula area to eyeball how the Bounder would fit. It’s right on the bay. We looked over the ducks in the water. What’s that? A Golden eye? We’ve never seen a Golden eye! A Common Golden eye. Not common for us. This day just keeps getting better. We struck up a conversation with some other birders there. We told them about the Mute Swan. They left to go find it. We watched a 30” cormorant swallow a 15” fish. That was impressive. We drove on. About ten feet. There was a little sparrow looking bird picking through the rubble on the shore. Big for a sparrow, but streaky chest like a sparrow. Like one of those crummy Savannah Sparrows. But it wasn’t a Savannah Sparrow. We looked some more. It didn’t act like a sparrow. It was walking instead of hopping. There is something else listed for here called a pipit. We’ve never seen a pipit, so we didn’t know if this was one or not. We looked it up. That’s it! An American Pipit! Three new birds in one day. A good day. A tour of the forest part of the park. A visit with the resident birder. A quick ferry ride. Dolphins. Pelicans. Texas barbeque in Port Aransas. Raced the sun home. A 150 mile day. Round trip in the Jeep. Tomorrow. The adventure begins. One hundred twenty miles round trip down the beach. One hundred miles of that is four-wheel drive only. We’ll take water. We have a shovel.
Posted on

Trip18

We’re staying at a fancy park. Most commercial RV parks, you rent a space, stay as long as you want, then leave. This kind is different. Each space is for sale. It’s an RV space condo. You buy your space, which is about 100 feet long and 45 feet wide. You sculpt it, landscape it, put in fancy brick patterns if you want, and it is your own. Now you can stay there anytime you want for the rest of your life. You own it. When you’re not staying there, you can have them rent it out for you if you want. People like Judy and I come rumbling down the road and rent it for a few nights. That helps offset the cost of owning it. It could make a nice home base, or seasonal home base. A retired person could buy one in each section of the country and just rotate. But then a person could just rent space by the month in a park like this for $300 or $400 a month and stay anywhere they wanted too. We usually spend some time with our motorhome parked out on the beach away from everybody, but we don’t think we want to do that with the new Bounder. We drove out to take a look today. The beach is nice and firm, but that’s a lot of weight to put out on the sand. We can stay in this park, and take the Jeep out. That’s what the Jeep is for. Take it out to all the rough messy places. Get the Jeep dirty and keep the house clean. There must be something misleading or confusing about the Bounder. When we checked into the park at Port Lavaca, the guy at the shack looked back and asked us how long we were. I told him, but wondered why he had to ask. We’re forty feet long, just like every other full-size Class A on the road. There are a few super-size ones at forty-five feet, but we’re obviously not one of those. He shook his head like he didn’t believe me and told me I could go look, but he wasn’t sure they had anything we could fit into. We didn’t have any trouble finding a spot. When we checked into this park, we got the same thing:“How long is that thing?”“Forty feet.”“Forty feet? Looks like forty-five to me.” These are people that do this for a living. I don’t know what it is about the Bounder I’m happy to report that Rags the cat still has his tail. Judy and I were in the front room when we heard a loud clunk, followed by a few muffled cat meows. Judy had been doing laundry and had the clothes separated into piles on the bedroom floor. The clothes hamper was empty, but it was still open. It is a heavy tilt out cabinet in the bedroom, that pulls out at the top and pivots at the bottom. When we went to check, it was closed. It had a cat in it. We find all the usual suspects on the beach here. Laughing, herring, and ring-billed gulls, sanderlings, willets, ruddy turnstones, black bellied plovers, piping plovers, and royal terns. Nothing new yet. We’ll keep looking. Today dawned warm and windy. Offshore wind blowing the tops off the waves. By evening it seemed to have blown the entire ocean flat. Hardly any swells. Hardly any waves. Just a slightly rolling smooth quiet ocean with a monster purple sunset. While we were down at Malaquite, checking out the beach, we got to watch the white-tailed hawks surfing the wind coming off the dunes. Stationary to us, they rode the ridge, sliding back and forth watching the grass for any sign of their next meal. Did I mention the armadillo? Not the one Judy befriended in the campground, but the one on the dashboard. Nice looking little stuffed guy. He’s up there next to the orca and the manatee. He got joined today by the stingray. Each other critter up because he’s cute, and he relates to something we did. The stingray is just up there because he’s cute. Here’s a picture of what a bigger motorhome looks like. Longer than ours, and it has an extra axle.
Posted on

Trip17

It was a dark and stormy night ……. It was an awesome storm. It has been warm, foggy, overcast, and rainy off and on for the last couple days. Last night it all broke loose. Midnight thunderstorms, frightening the dog and pounding the motorhome. Judy got up to look, and said it was like someone making a movie in the rain under pouring fire hoses. It rained in waves. The ocean was wild. The ocean got closer to us while we slept. Our 100 yards of beach shrank to twenty yards. I snoozed warm and dry in bed until it was over. We’re happy to report that the Bounder, slides and all, weathered the storm flawlessly. It was a noisy night. It was great! This morning dawned flooded. Our site was fine, but the one directly across from us was completely under water. We had our oatmeal and coffee: a leisurely morning in the fog and drizzle, then headed out for Mustang Island 200 miles to the south. We left 65 degrees and foggy and arrived at 80 degrees and blue skies. It was good. We drove loops in the parking lot to calibrate the compass. It worked. You know how you can check the accuracy of you speedometer, by watching the highway markers? You find a watch with a second hand, hold sixty miles per hour exactly for one mile and time yourself. If it takes exactly 60 seconds, you’re lucky, and your speedometer is accurate. If it takes something more or less, not only is your speedometer off, but you have to be able to do arithmetic to figure out how much it is off. There is another way. You ask Judy how fast you are going, she pushes a button on the computer, and the GPS Navigator announces “current speed, sixty-one point seven miles per hour”. Instant. Agrees with our speedometer. We’re lucky. This measurement is not tied to the vehicle at all. The speedometer is driven by the wheels and road. The computer is corresponding with satellites overhead that all agree our speed is sixty-one point seven miles per hour. Last time I asked the computer which satellite it was using to track us, it listed the eight satellites that were currently engaged. Big Brother? We are currently being monitored by eight big brothers. We’ll be careful not to do anything nefarious while the GPS is online. Just when I thought there would be no more clues forthcoming in the great cream cheese incident, a resolution presents itself! But I have to start somewhere else. I have to start with diet. I have discovered recently that the afternoon food fades I’ve experienced all my life are due to carbohydrate poisoning. Nature’s most perfect food: complex carbohydrates? Starchy foods like potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread. They’re poison to me. I eat them. My liver panics and floods me with insulin. The insulin sucks all the sugar out of my blood. My forehead hits the table, or whatever else is in front of it. It leaves a mark. Every person needs carbohydrates to function. Now what do I do? The solution is elegantly simple. All vegetables are made up of carbohydrates, but they don’t deliver as heavy a load as the starches do. I don’t have to abandon carbohydrates altogether and try to figure out some other way to survive. All I have to do is abandon potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread altogether, and eat as much of every other kind of fruit and vegetable I can, and I get all the carbohydrates I need, and I feel awake and great. How cool is that? And what could possibly go wrong? Cream cheese. It’s all about the cream cheese. I had discovered a new favorite snack. Celery and cream cheese. It gives me some fat in the cream cheese, balanced by the carbohydrates of the celery. Nothing complex there. I’ve been eating it every day. Now I have to digress one more time. When my blood sugar gets low, I get to feeling generally lethargic. One of the symptoms of being lethargic is that I don’t think things through well, often failing to recognize that I’m feeling lethargic, and not considering that I might have a blood sugar issue. I had been feeling lethargic for several days. The only little change in my diet lately, has been the addition of the perfect snack. Celery and cream cheese. That was it! The cream cheese! I read the labels. Cream cheese is about 50% carbohydrates. Hard cheese is about none. I don’t know what it is about the carbohydrates in the cream cheese, but that was the problem. I substituted hard cheese for the cream cheese the next day, and the energy was perfect. Which brings me to the great cream cheese incident. Here, all this time I was wondering if a pet could possibly be involved in appropriating my cream cheese for their own benefit, but without any clues, who’s to say? Now I realize I was completely wrong in my suspicions. It was not a matter of pets putting their interests ahead of mine. It was our animals, who are much more in touch with inner processes than I am, protecting me from myself! They knew, days before I figured it out, what I was doing to myself, and at the first opportunity leaped to my defense. They fell on the grenade. They sacrificed their own energy levels to protect mine. What noble creatures.
Posted on

Trip16

Finally! We agree. We’re moving on tomorrow morning. A private RV park we’ve had our eye on. We found it on the internet and called ahead for a beachfront site. No crested caracaras. No problem. We see a lot of those farther south. They’re only unusual up here. No sparrows. Sparrows suck. Well I did see three today, but they were all Savannah Sparrows. Been there. We saw a bunch yesterday, but they were all Chipping Sparrows. No seaside sparrows. No wrens. Know what my kind of bird is? It’s a Great Kiskadee. There aren’t very many of them, and they don’t go very far north. Not many people ever get to see them. They are bright yellow and black, kind of like Dad’s old Auburn sedan. Their habit is to fly into an area, land on the top of the tallest tree around, and scream as loud as they can. And they are loud. They are big, about the size of a crow, and they are loud. You hear them, then you look around for the bright black and yellow beacon on the top of the tallest tree. That’s my kind of bird. Not some rotten little brown bird that just hides in the bushes and won’t come out. We’re considering getting some press-on labels for the pet dishes. Every morning Judy pours fresh dog food into the dog bowl and fresh cat food into the cat bowl. Every day, each animal goes straight to the other pet’s food to eat. This is not a random thing. It’s not fifty-fifty. Every time. They may sneak some of their own from time to time, but the first meal for each is always the other’s food. Wait! I know! Nevermind the labels. We’ll just switch the bowls. Today’s challenge was to calibrate the compass. Judy gave me a really cool digital compass for Christmas. In 2002. I never installed it in Shamu. Shamu already had a compass, and this one seemed to high tech for Shamu anyway. But now. Now we’re driving the perfect home for this compass. The calibration process follows the installation process. I got through the installation process, no problem. It’s kind of far away, mounted on the windshield, but it is large enough I can see it well from the driver’s chair. The calibration process consists of pushing the correct sequence of buttons, then driving the motorhome completely around in a circle, in no less that 20 seconds, then pushing the right button on the compass to complete the process. This somehow allows the compass to distinguish between the earth’s magnetic field, and the magnetic fields of everything else around it. It is a high tech compass. So today, we took the motorhome out for a final dump before we head out tomorrow morning. On the way back into the campground, we stopped, pushed the sequence of buttons (Notice I didn’t say the correct sequence of buttons). Then drove a loop of the campground, past our campsite, and back to where we started. I pushed the concluding button. Nothing happened. Our compass remains uncalibrated. I already pretty much had the attention of everyone in the campground already with my slow rumbling loop. I decided that was enough for one day and I would try again tomorrow. Somewhere else. Did I mention that we have the best spot in the park? Really, we do. Broadside to the beach, and separated from everyone else. Each time we fire up to move the motorhome to dump it, people in the spots around us run for their ignition keys and watch hopefully to see if we’re really leaving. I’ll save them the serial disappointments. We have located an unused parking lot at the other end of the park. We can drive over there tomorrow morning and drive loops until we get it right. Then we’ll not only have a compass, we’ll have a calibrated compass. The final bird count for this park: 58. Tomorrow, off to Mustang Island two hundred miles south and five degrees warmer. Oh. And just in case you haven’t been able to properly imagine Judy’s new pelican:
Posted on

Port Aransas


We watched an osprey hunt. There are four ponds here, and ponds on adjacent properties. Plenty to keep an osprey occupied for half an hour, circling, pausing, holding, circling more. He made a couple false drops, terminated before splashdown, without making any actual strikes. We’ve seen osprey snag trout out of steams in the high country. None from the ponds here so far. We know there are plenty of fish in the ponds. We can see them.

We saw another osprey, this one from the Naval Air Base outside Corpus Christi. It’s a vertical takeoff, tilt rotor, military airplane. It was in horizontal flight mode, big goofy helicopter propellers on the wings, wallowing around in circles over Corpus Christi Bay at about fifty miles an hour. Not an intimidating sight.

Talked to a neighbor, a retired pilot, about it. I commented on how slow it was flying in horizontal flight mode and he said the propellers in front of the wing produce enough movement over the airfoil to generate lift even at slow speeds. You can generate lift by blowing your own air over your wing?

Ooh. If that is true, then who needs all that complicated tilt rotor technology to create a vertical takeoff machine? All you need to do is blow enough air over your wings to create lift. Of course if you do that, you’re going to be pulling yourself forward, but that’s not a problem, blow some air the other way with propellers that don’t blow over the wing to stop the forward motion. How hard could it be? When you’re ready to go forward, just ease off the opposing propellers.

Here is what the real airplane, the Osprey, looks like (I didn’t actually take these pictures myself. I found them on the internet.)