Texas Gulf Beach

Ok, I have to admit, I wasn't sure what to expect at all. Other than South Padre Island and spring break mania, I had never heard of anyone going on a beach vacation on the Gulf in Texas. I was wondering what the reason was for that. Were there refineries on the beach? Were the oil rigs so close in that they seriously messed up the view to create an ugly beach? Why doesn't anyone come here?

Well, people do come here, they are just Texans. I don't happen to know a lot of Texans. And those that DO come here would surely be smart enough not to blab about this place to the entire world. But only a very small subset of the world reads my blog, so I'm not afraid to tell you about it. Just don't tell real estate developers.

We are at a place called Port Aransas. Known as Port A to the regulars. There is a gorgeous wide sandy beach,calm surf, and from our camper, we can see the water. This town has NO nasty high rise condos, just sand dunes, behind which are little beach cottages and a few condos that are low rise and not at all objectionable. There are no mansions on the beach. The restaurants are low key places that have signs that say things like: you catch it, we'll cook it! It is the sort of beach community average people could bring their kids to and eat in any restaurant. There are a good handful of bars too. There is some spring break activity here, but it is largely contained and there has been very little police activity associated with that. This is an island and you have to take a ferry to get to, and the one thing that is missing is over water type establishments, there are none that we've seen. But almost all of the restaurants have outdoor dining. There are no chains here except for ONE fast food place called Whataburger. Otherwise even the grocery store is an IGA... There are no chain "casual dining" establishements and it is just a welcome vacation from that whole scene. So I will take some more pictures today and I will post them.

Get out of my SWAMP!

11:35 am March 17, 2009 Oh wow, it’s St. Patrick’s Day.
Ok, ok, for the billionth time, I promise, I won’t mess with Texas! Good god almighty, these signs are everywhere. I figure they post them every 10 or 20 miles and when you are crossing the home of our illustrious former president you go about 700 + miles so I figure I’ve been told about 70 times not to mess with Texas, but they only tell you one time what exactly they mean by that. When you cross the border into Texas, you get the requisite “Don’t mess with Texas” sign but with a translation below it for those non-Texans among us, that says “Please don’t litter.” So ok, I won’t.
I might actually get internet access and be able to post today from the lovely Corpus Christi Lake KOA campground. I have lost count of the number of times we have yelled at each other…”all of you fairy tale creatures, GET OUT OF MY SWAMP!”
And a swamp it is. But getting here from the desert to the swamp was the interesting part. Yesterday morning we had a relaxing morning in Whites City New Mexico. I made pancakes for breakfast, a pot of coffee and started a loaf of bread in the bread machine and did a load of laundry. (We do more before 9 am than most people….ok, ok, I’ll shut up!) Then we packed up and got on the road. We intended to use the bread for sandwiches that afternoon, but realized we had no bread knife with us and therefore no way to slice the bread. Believe it or not, we stopped at a Wal-Mart along the way and they did not have a bread knife (obviously not a supercenter). So we carried on, and had the interesting and frightening experience of having the car battery die at a rest area. Luckily the guys parked in front of us happened to have jumper cables and a good disposition. We decided to get as close to the coast as possible and to make an obnoxiously long story short, we made it as far as Corpus Christi Lake (we are about an hour from the coast). When we arrived at 5 am this morning (no joke) we parked the camper and it began to rain. Sure, you’re thinking, so what? Well, first of all, we’ve never had this camper in the rain (we have never come this far East in the camper…) so we had no idea if it was actually waterproof. We woke up dry, so now we know. However, for the sake of demonstration, imagine that you are in a giant Campbell’s soup can, trying to sleep and a hail of beebees keeps falling on the can. That gives you a close approximation of what it sounded like. But it was 5 am and it was clean, dry and legal. I was happy. Then it happened. It started as a faint rumble and got louder. It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen the train tracks, we had driven right over them on the way in, but when we parked we had no idea that we were about 20 yards from the tracks. And oh my god, you want to talk LOUD…as the foghorn thing blared several times Charlie raced to the back of the camper to calm any panicked kids if they woke up.
And there you have it, proof positive that you can INDEED drive a freight train through the kids bedrooms and they won’t wake up.

Sunday, March 15 9:03 pm

I write to you tonight from Whites City, New Mexico. Since my last post where I told about this trip, we have had a major change of plans. We were originally going to head north up to all the places listed in the last post, however a major weather system moved in that was going to derail our plans because the temperatures in Southern Utah were going to be unusually cold. I have no desire to freeze us to death so back to the drawing board I went. I spent Friday while the kids were in school researching where we could go that would not be so cold. The only drivable answer that was not below the Mexican border was, naturally, Texas. So we headed out Friday night and made it to an area near Chirracahua National Monument. We spent Saturday morning exploring the monument, which was really remote and very neat. There are very cool rock formations too look at and we got to see a deer. However when we got to the top of the peak, it began to SNOW on us…so much for my warm spring break! That afternoon after exploring the monument we were off toward Texas. We ate dinner in El Paso (don’t even ask, I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say we made a huge error in choice of food; we had the idiocy to choose something other than Mexican when were so close to Mexico we could spit there…) The kids were fascinated by being so close to the border and they got a good lesson in current events when we explained the Tale of Two Cities thing going on between El Paso and Juarez.

After dinner we headed out of El Paso on a small two lane Texas Road where were stopped not once, but twice by law enforcement wondering if we were transporting illegals in the camper. Do I LOOK like a coyote to you with my 5 kids and my family truckster??? It was a long interesting night and even though we were not transporting illegals we did in fact camp illegally two nights out of two. (This is another issue about which I should probably skip the details and simply say we were too tired to drive anymore and it was better to just stop and sleep; it just so happens that we happen to drive with a small house on the back of the car…)

We have had the usual obnoxious car antics that would drive lesser parents to drop their kids off on the Salt Flats and let the javalinas sort them out, thankfully it seems that, although we don’t think of ourselves as patient people we’ve never once actually thrown a kid to the wild animals. This trip is no different and everyone is still occupying their seat in the car. W

So we are headed to the Padre Island National Seashore on the Gulf of Mexico. Today we spent the day with another bad food experience, and then wandering the Carlsbad Caverns. They caverns are totally amazing, but I will tell you what…this place is seriously remote. We are really far from civilization. Very few businesses in the town of Carlsbad were open today; it’s Sunday. It is off season to be fair, but you know us city people we want our goods and services. Walmart was open for just our kind.

Here we go again!

All of my regular readers will be thrilled to know that since we have no money, but we do have an abundance of time, we have decided to travel with the kids this spring for spring break. This will be another camping adventure to a bunch of national parks, and if any of the previous trips provide any type of example, this blog should get more interesting with each passing day.

With the advent of my Facebook account, I realize there might be some new readers here who have no idea what this is about. If you have some spare time, and the unemployed among us have tons, I encourage you to go backward in this blog and read about some of our previous year's adventures. Traveling with 5 small children in an SUV pulling a camper is a recipe for fun, frustration and hilarity to those who are only reading about it.

Once again, we only talked about this for the first time about a week ago, so our plans are vague at best. We have 10 days to work with and I want to focus on the places that are too blasted hot in the summer to enjoy even a little bit. So on my list is Zion National Park, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef (for the biggies) and Canyon de Chelly, and Petrified Forest NP. Who knows where we'll end up, but we will be heading in the direction of the four corners with an emphasis on the Southern Utah region. I love Southern Utah, if I was Momon I would move there, but I'm not so here I'll stay in Phoenix.

I started the kids on packing their plastic boxes today (those of you who've been down this path before know about this...) Each kid gets one box to fill with their stuff. They have a checklist I give them with what to pack and I do laundry almost every night so everyone has fresh stuff to change into in the morning. Basically, everyone brings one cold weather outfit, one warm weather outfit and pjs, socks and undies and two pairs of shoes. In the summer we also bring swinsuits, but we are not bringing them this time of year. Also everyone is required (when I have the wearwithall to enforce it) to wear a hat.

I checked the temperatures in Zion two days ago and it is in the 40s at night and between the 60s and 70s during the day. That is perfect weather for hiking and just hanging out. I am hoping we do not encounter snow.

Charlie gets home from his ski trip tomorrow and I'm hoping to have the kids stuff all organized by the time he gets here so he can walk in the door, get the keys and go pick up the camper. Then we can plug it in and make sure the propane tanks are good and get the fridge working. Then Friday when the kids are at school, we will pack up the everything and leave as soon as the kids get home from school.

So by now you have probably asked yourself, "who is taking care of the chickens? God please tell me they did not even think about bringing the chickens!" I'm glad you are so concerned about their welfare! Of course we're not bringing them! Our 12 year old niece graciously agreed to watch them for a sum of money that is affordable even to us unemployed slackers. Thank you Courtney!!

Here are links to some of the places we are planning to try to hit.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument
Petrified Forest National Park
Zion National Park
Capitol Reef National Park
Canyonlands National Park

If we actually get out of Phoenix on Friday (just because this is our plan, does not mean it will actually happen) we might spend the first night here:
Sunset Crater National Monument
I have no idea actually if their campground is open this time of year, I suppose I should go to that link myself and look that up, eh? Otherwise, there is a KOA not too far from there that is year round.