Posted on

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.
Posted on

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.
Posted on

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.