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Houses01

I thought the houses here were pretty interesting. There are all kinds. And they’re all interesting.
There are nice ones on the beach, little ones on the beach, and ratty old ones on the beach.
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Trip13

Sixty-five degrees. Sunshine. The tiniest of sea breezes. It doesn’t have to be any warmer than that. Lying in the sun barefoot with my shirt off sure takes me back to my youth. The smell of the salty air. The sound of the waves. Sleepy in the sun. Judy and I spent a lot of time on the beach together when we were kids. Not only did I get to run on the beach today, I got to run barefoot on the beach. It was nice. Mostly. I may not do it again. It’s a very shelly beach. It’s a little hard on the feet. I was careful not to get too much sun today. Saved some room for tomorrow. We have a new yard decoration. A four-winged whirligig pelican. Imagine that! Just try. I dare you. Just try. Judy is assembling it at this very moment. In fact, she just claimed this is no ordinary pelican. She got that right. Oops! Pelican update. The pelican has five wings! How can a pelican have five wings? Think gattling gun. The barrel spins. The wings are attached to the barrel. Actually in this case, any breeze spins the wings, which spins the barrel, which is in the middle of the Pelican. We’ve been watching this little Piping Plover on the beach. It runs around on the sand right at the water’s edge. It is so cute. It is only slightly bigger than a sparrow, and looks like a little Friar Tuck. He has a white belly, a light brown back, and a white collar around where his neck would be if he had a neck. He is a really really cute round little bird. You have to just want to hug him. They do have a sparrow here, called a seaside sparrow, we’re interested in. I read the description carefully, and he is never once described as “the elusive seaside sparrow”, or “the secretive seaside sparrow”. Promising. Tomorrow’s mission: the seaside sparrow in the salt marsh. We drove down-island for a while today, just looking around. There are a lot of vacation homes here, right up on the beach, and right up on stilts. The legs have to be long and strong so they won’t provide any resistance to the storm surge when the water is blown across the barrier island during hurricanes. There are some mighty fine looking vacation homes here. Clearly these are million dollar plus houses, and they’re empty; shuttered up tight for the off-season. By driving out of the state park and down the island, we got to where we could get the car back out on the beach again. There is something about driving on the beach I really like. It was so foreign to us the first time we did it. This is not something you would ever imagine doing in California. But now I’m hooked. I love driving down the beach looking at everything. The weather is so nice now that we slept with the furnaces completely off and both the windows above our bed open all night. We got to sleep to the sound of the waves. I could do this for a while. Oh. We’re told there is a nesting pair of crested caracaras here too. We’ll look for those tomorrow.
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Trip11

Moved on. It’s interesting. Galveston Island State Park used to be 65 miles away from Sea Rim State Park. Now it’s 140 miles away. The change in distance has to do with hurricanes. And highways. There used to be a highway running the length of the Bolivar Peninsula. Then there was a free ferry that crossed over to Galveston Island. Highway 87. We drove it a few years ago when we started west of New Orleans, and followed the coast around all the way down to South Texas. Not this year though. Highway 87 runs south of Sea Rim for a few miles then disappears into sand dunes. The highway got washed out. They don’t seem to be considering replacing it. We drove the big loop back through Port Arthur, around Galveston bay, through Baytown, Texas City, across to Galveston Island, then down island to the state park. We’re so high on the coastal bend here, that the beach still runs mostly east/west. The road out through Port Arthur goes directly through an oil refinery. For a mile. What an impressive batch of machinery. And then, a little farther down the road. Well out from the city, the highway crosses a road called “big hill road”. Out in the middle of nowhere, in the flat featureless coastal plain is a road called “big hill road”. What could that story be? We birded the seashore for peeps, dumped, hooked up, and left. Got part way here and it was time for the Colts, Kansas City game to start and we weren’t anywhere yet, so we stopped. We found a large truck parking area off the highway, set the jacks, opened the slide, pointed the dish, had lunch, and watched football. We had a three-hour rest stop, then resumed the drive and got here before dark. We watched four games this weekend. Every team we rooted for lost. Our record for the playoffs is unblemished. What a great spot we got to! The beach is long and clean. The state park campground here is not a parking lot. It is well separated grassy sites with electricity and water hookups, picnic benches and shelters. We got the best spot. Broadside to the beach. Separated from everyone else. A freshwater pond directly behind us. No bugs. Comfortable temperature. The bird list shows 49 bird species as common here in winter, and another 44 birds as seen about once a week. Wonder if there are any new ones for us in there. Don’t think there will be any hurry to move on. There seems to be something wrong with our propane gauge. After a week on the road of cold temperatures, with the furnaces seeming to run constantly to keep us comfortable, and then several more days of running every night, it still reads half full. That just doesn’t seem right. We discovered we don’t need full hookups to do laundry. The State Parks always have electricity and water. We can do several loads and let the water run into the tanks. Two loads only produces half a tank of gray water. We just have to dump the tanks a little more often than we would otherwise. Not an issue if we’re moving frequently anyway. Not a big issue even if we’re not, considering it took me all of five minutes to drop the suspension, set the jacks and level, open the slides, and connect the electric and water. We decided we should be careful about how much we trust GPS navigation. It calculates a practical route for you, by highway, to your destination. If you miss a turn and end up in a neighborhood, instead of on a highway, it will calculate a new route for you to fix things. It did that for us today. In the city of Galveston. It’s funny. This rig seems to be the perfect size when we’re out on the highway. The perfect size. The perfect ride. It’s fantastic. But the smaller the road gets, the bigger the rig gets. We got onto some streets that made the Bounder positively huge. Much too big for those streets. The navigator, realizing we had rudely ignored its instructions began calculating new routes for us to correct our mistake. It is set to provide motorhome friendly routes, so we turned right on 57th street when it told us to. It had calculated the most direct, fastest way back to the highway we should have been on. We took up entire streets, creeped through dips and intersections, ducked and weaved under trees, mostly, and it took entirely too long to get back to where we wanted to be. Next time, we will let it recalculate new routes street by street. We will not turn again on a side street that doesn’t at least have a traffic light. Let it continue to recalculate until we find our way there on streets that look right to us. It did get us here. We’ll just make it a more cooperative effort next time. A one hundred forty mile day.

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Trip10

Another nice day on the beach. Not really warm, fifty degrees, but not much wind, so very comfortable. I was good and Judy was bad. We were supposed to spend the day looking down into bushes and grass for sparrows and wrens. We spent the morning on the fringes of a live-oak forest bird sanctuary. Judy kept looking in the trees. She kept trying to find that Great Horned Owl that hooted hello at her. We learned a lot about sparrows today. We learned every sparrow that flies away to land on a bush and look back at you is a savannah sparrow. We saw a lot of savannah sparrows today. Every sparrow that is invisible until it flushes from your feet, rockets about twenty feet away and disappears into the underbrush, is every other kind of sparrow. We learned wrens do not actually exist. We figured out we need the help of a trained professional if we’re ever going to get better at sparrows and wrens. That’s it! We need a bird coach. We have Rick guide us for a day every time we go flyfishing in Montana. I have a racquetball coach, Woody. Yeah. We need a bird coach. Spent some time on the beach. Marveled at the abandoned car way low on the sand at low tide. It was one of those pretend four-wheel drive cars that got down where he shouldn’t have been. I guess that’s one way to find out where you should be and where you shouldn’t be. His front wheels were still up, but his back wheels were buried to the frame. Time was not on his side. On our return back up the beach, he was still there and the tide was clearly coming back in. There are no wreckers close by. You have to wait for one to come from somewhere else. Been driving the Jeep all over. It’s working well. Guess there is no hurry replacing those worn front tires. I’m keeping a close eye on the tread. We did well on birds overall. Picked up fifteen more birds here to bring our total for this park to 53. Decided that shorebirds mattered much more than sparrows and wrens. Shorebirds are hard. There are a lot of peeps we haven’t figured out yet. They all kind of look alike. I spent some time today making a bird list just for this park, showing only the birds that are here, and the important identification features of each, then arranged it in order of size. I’m ready for those stinking peeps now. By this time tomorrow we’ll know every little bird on the beach. Judy spent the evening with the vacuum, sucking up mosquitoes. We’ll leave tomorrow. Except for the football game. We want to watch the Chiefs play the Colts. They play at noon our time. Hard to get settled somewhere else by twelve without getting up early. Don’t want to race the clock after three. We might have to dump the tanks and stay another day. Updated total bird count: 285. I think there are seven hundred species of birds in the US at one time or another each year. How hard could it be to get to 300?
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Trip08

Wow! We drove over two hundred miles today. Almost two hundred fifty. Got to sleep to the sound of rain all night. I have to remind my Pacific Northwest brothers that’s a treat. Took a walk in the morning mist. Cold and foggy. We walked on the birding boardwalk around the wetlands. At the time of its construction, this was the longest boardwalk in the world, constructed entirely out of recycled plastic. It wasn’t as long this trip as it was last trip. Neither was the fishing pier. They had a hurricane in July. Got to see the spoonbills, and snow geese. Got to see all the usual ocean shore suspects: pelicans, gulls, turnstones, sanderlings, willets, sandpipers, egrets. You know. And in the marsh, we got to hear a clapper rail. I’m happy to report that the boat covers held. They never blew off yesterday. And they hold water just fine too. Two boat cover lakes on top of the Jeep in front of us. We left Port Lavaca, drove north through Point Comfort, glanced off Houston, and came to rest right back by the water again at Sea Rim State Park. It’s a parking lot campground, right on the water. We headed into our spot rather than backing in. Now we can sit in the front and look right out the big windshield across the dunes to the waves and water. The water is all of 100 feet away. Good wave noise. I got to run on the beach today. It involved long sleeves and long pants, but it was a run on the beach. Judy has been reading the park literature we got at the gate. They have mosquitoes here. We already knew that. We noticed the bug clouds forming as the sun went down. In their literature they’re proud to announce they have sixty separate species of mosquito that inhabit this park. Wow! Guess we’ll have to start a new list. I might need bigger binoculars. We accidentally popped a window open briefly a few minutes ago. Now Judy is busily killing sixty species of mosquitoes. She knows she only has to kill the females. The males don’t bite. But since none of them are exhibitionists, she has to kill them all. Sure glad we’re not sleeping in a tent. There are four people in the 23 foot class C next to us tonight. Three adults, one kid, a great dane, and two other dogs. They’re expecting three more adults and two more dogs to join them Saturday. The three more adults are supposed to sleep in tents. I couldn’t sleep in a tent in this bug-storm. I’m guessing they end up with seven people and five dogs in the 23 footer. We’re sure glad to have this nice tight motorhome. Annie is a bug-killer. Whenever Buck saw or heard the fly swatter, he would run for cover. Aha! Another mystery. How could a big strong dog like Buck get negatively conditioned to the fly swatter? Any answers? Any speculation? Children? But Annie. Annie loves bugs. Every time she hears the fly-swatter smack, she comes running to see if something tasty will fall off the ceiling into her mouth. During a serious bug smacking event, like tonight, you can’t smack the furniture or walls without smacking Annie at the same time, she is so anxious for her morsel. Good bird news. I’ve been reviewing the park bird list, and they have a wren here we’ve never seen. It’s called a sedge wren, and it’s listed as abundant here, so this one will be a slam-dunk. After all, how hard could it be to find a bird that’s listed as abundant? It is warmer here. I turned the furnaces off for a while for the first time this trip. They’ve run a lot keeping us warm and comfortable. Now Judy is roaming the motorhome with a sponge, cleaning all the bug smears off the walls.