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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.
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Trip09

Nice night. It rained off and on, then the wind came up and blew all the mosquitos to El Paso. It dawned bright and calm in the forties. Did some birding from the car, and by mid-day it was sixty degrees with a sea breeze. T-shirt and shorts for a run, but otherwise it was chilly without a windbreaker. We went in search of the secretive sedge wren. We got distracted. Wow! What a great place to bird. We saw 38 different kinds of birds today. Tons of great, large, colorful, easy to spot wading birds. Snow geese by the thousands. Egrets by the thousands. Roseate spoonbills. Hundreds of white pelicans. Hundreds of herons and cormorants and ibis. And a bobcat. We got a long look at a huge male bobcat that haunts the area. Saw a new bird of prey: a black shouldered kite. Saw him flying. Watched him hunt. Then later, Judy spotted a pair of them perched on adjacent posts, so we got an extended look. There sure are a lot of warning signs around here not to annoy the alligators. I swear, they really use that word. Do not annoy the alligators. We don’t get to see our neighbors sleep seven people and five dogs in their 23 foot camper after all. They had a difficult night with the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are only a problem around sun down and after. We didn’t have any bug problems all day today. But our neighbors were in an old leaky motorhome that didn’t seal up well. They were infiltrated by intruders all night. They packed up today and went back to Dallas. We discovered how to peacefully coexist with the mosquitoes. We go anywhere we want and do anything we want all day long. By about five o’clock, we finish everything that involves going outside, then leave the doors and windows closed as much as possible. A few mosquitoes get in anyway, of course. When we’re completely through going in and out for the night, Judy fires up the vacuum and wanders the entire motorhome sucking up mosquitoes. They’re not a problem. Life on the beach. Fresh shrimp stir-fry for dinner tonight. We saw all those big birds. We saw lots of little birds too. There are several really cool kinds of sparrows here. We saw bushes with sparrows in them, but didn’t see many sparrows clearly. How many wrens did we see? The slam-dunk, can’t miss sedge wren? Zero. Not a single wren of any kind. What is their habitat? Salt marsh. Where are we? Surrounded by salt marsh. It’s going to take another day here, ignoring the big obvious birds, looking down into the bushes. Then, south along the coast.

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Trip07

South. I mean East! Went east. I know, it’s raining to the east. But it’s not like we really decided. It just happened. We slept in late, took a walk, did some birding, had a run, had lunch, pulled out, hooked up, and were out of there. In the early afternoon. We had the most comfortable birding yet. A great campsite with birds flitting all around the motorhome. We got our binoculars, sat in the big seats in the front, tilted them back, rested our elbows on the armrests, and went to work. Twenty-two different birds. All of them from warm and dry with hot coffee and snacks. But wait! It gets better! One of those birds was a never-before-seen Harris’ sparrow. That gets us to 284. Two hundred eighty-four birds on our list. We have been close to three hundred for several years now. Wonder if we could make it this trip? Probably not. It’s hard to find a new bird very often now. We got the most important one, though. The green kingfisher. Boy was it fun to get that one. Now we’ll have to pick a new “most important one to get”. The co-pilot navigated us here. Not only does it provide all the directions and tell you how you’re doing, it provides a continuously updated ETA. Judy wants a bumper sticker: “GPS is my Co-Pilot”. Still no suspects in the great cream cheese incident. Guess it’s a mystery that will never be solved. We had a laundry detergent incident today. Liquid laundry detergent all over the bathroom sink cabinet. There was a bottle of laundry detergent there, but it appears undamaged. We banished it to the bathtub for a couple hours and no more soap appeared outside the bottle. Another mystery. This one does not involve pets as suspects though. Left the inland parks and drove east through Victoria to the coast. Here we are in Port Lavaca. Cool and rainy, right on the water in the RV camping for a Texas State Fishing Pier. Full hookups, so we can take long hot showers, wash our hair, do a couple loads of laundry, and a little cat vacuuming. Downright decadent. A 100 mile day. We’ve been using a humidifier to combat the cool dry weather. Doesn’t look like we’ll need that again for a while. Update on the mobile office project. We figured out how to identify all the rural nonprofit organizations in Colorado, and began our mailing to them in November. The response was underwhelming. Very quiet. We kept mailing. Then, in the week after Christmas, we started getting some calls. In the two days before we left the office, we got three inquiries, one of which wanted a proposal. Just got an email from Jamie today, telling us there are five more that want proposals. Maybe we will be doing more traveling around Colorado. Something to look forward to on our return. We’ll check out the wetlands bird watching boardwalk in the morning. Last time we were here we got to see some roseate spoonbills. Still have to pick a direction to go next. The decision got easier, though. We’re right on the water, so we eliminated one of the direction options, and we just came from another one. We’ll go north along the coast, or south along the coast. The forecast is for warming across South Texas.