February 22 – March 1, 2014
After bidding my family adieu, we once again headed to the beach. This time our destination was Port Aransas, Texas. We were hopping for beautiful beach weather, meaning warm and sunny, but once again we were denied. Apparently, we are not supposed to get tan yet. We had a week of fog, wind, rain, and cold (highs in the 50s). We did make the best of it, as we were camping at Mustang Island State Park with only the dunes separating us from the beach. Wizard loves playing in the sand and the miles of beach were his playground. He is so funny; he found a piece of a coconut shell and played for 15 minutes by himself in the sand with his new toy. He threw it in the air, buried it, and kicked it around! So we had a daily beach walks with our buddy. We came across our first encounter with the dreaded Portuguese man-o-war. Luckily it was dead on the beach. They are beautiful creatures, but I am ok with not encountering a live one. Another beach revelation was just how many RVs park on the beach and camp! As I mentioned before I was astonished by the ability to drive your car on the beach (which we did a lot here) but even more impressed by camping on it! There are several county, state, and national parks along this stretch of Texas that allow beachfront camping for minimal charge or FREE. Mind blown!
One such area is Padre Island National Seashore. This national park is quite beautiful (despite being saturated in fog for our visit). It has 70 miles of untouched coastline and is a refuge for a lot of sea life, particularity birds. 60 miles of such beach is available for boon docking for free (14 day stay limit and must register with the park office). We will definitely camp here someday, just not today. We drove along many miles of this beach taking in the beauty (it was too cold to walk) and smell of the ocean air. This is a very relaxing place and again an excellent birding sight.
In fact, this whole area of coastline is great for birding. We spent an afternoon in Port Aransas Nature Preserve at Charlie’s Pasture, which is a bird sanctuary within Port Aransas. They have a great boardwalk and lots of bird viewing areas. Wade and I felt a little out-of-place because we didn’t have our binoculars! There are also many other areas of this birding trail in Port Aransas and the surrounding area. Overall this area is a great spot to watch and learn about birds.
We spent our remaining days exploring the Corpus Christi Bay area. We had a nice meal in the marina in downtown Corpus Christi and admired some mini-mansions along the bay front. However, since the weather was not cooperating, we decided to leave the beach a couple of days early and split up our next drive.
Thus we ended up in nowhere Texas. Or maybe oil field Texas! It was Crystal City, Texas and ranches and oil/fracking fields surround it. The RV Park was actually pretty nice and we had full hookups (we only had water and electricity at the beach). Therefore, we took advantage of the water and sewer and did many loads of laundry, washed Atreyu (the RV), Falcor (the car), and Wizard! Then we just relaxed. We did venture into town to try their Mexican food. We are very close to Mexico, so we thought we would enjoy some authentic cuisine. The food was just okay and I think we got several new wrinkles while waiting for it. The RV manager did warn us that there were not any good restaurants in the city. Oh well. Crystal City is called the spinach capital of the world and has a couple of statues of Popeye. Why is it the spinach capital of the world? We are still not sure after asking a couple of locals. It does have a Dole plant in town, however they do not grow spinach here. But they do have a Spinach fest in the fall. There you go, it is the middle of nowhere Texas after all. We spent two nights here then gladly ventured on.
Until next time, Eat your Spinach!
