Kayaking with the Dolphins

I woke up to an amazing sunrise.  I had the presence of mind to lean out of the door and take a few pictures.  There’s always a half dozen or more tanker ships lounging around out there, so they show up in the picture also.  They look like little cities at night, with all their lights on.

After breakfast, which included one of those super delicious Texas grapefruits, we took a long walk on the beach and then headed out for the day’s adventures.  First order of the day, check out the pickleball courts to see if we can play a few rounds.

Nope.  The courts were jammed.  Which makes sense.  This place has many massive RV parks and pickleball is a very popular pastime for retirees.  This picture is a Google screenshot of the RV park right next to the community park, where the courts are located.  There are many more just like this.  We walked through one of them the other night. Every site was full.  Countless numbers of RVs packed in like sardines.

In contrast, our site is right on the beach, with the back window facing the water.  The sunrises and moonrises over the water are fantastic.  The nearest neighbor is perhaps 50 yards away.  I would imagine that is different during Spring Break, but for now, the beach camping is nearly deserted.  We don’t have any hookups so we have to rely on five solar panels to supply all of our power.  We have to make 35 gallons of water stretch for several days.  But the price is right.  For the cost of a beach parking permit, at twelve dollars, we’ve been camped out here for five nights.  It’s super quiet, except for the sound of the surf and an occasional golf cart driving by.  We’ll be sorry to leave this place.

I suppose when you stay longer than a few days, you will eventually need hookups.  And the beach parking is limited to a few days every three weeks.  Which some people get around by simply moving to a different location on the beach every few days.  People that stay at the RV parks are not really transients like us, but more like Winter Texans (yes, that’s a thing) who spend several weeks or even months here.  The Winter Texans are probably the ones plugging up the pickleball courts (many of them seem to know each other), and they probably participate in the local activities, such as the belt sander races, put on every other Saturday by a local bar.

But I digress.  We abandoned the pickleball idea and drove to the kayak launch spot along the Port Aransas Channel.  There are several paddling trails in that area which sounded like fun.

We soon figured out we got there at low tide.  Which made most of the paddling trails inaccessible.  So we paddled along the channels on either side of the Redfish Bay Causeway.  The day was super calm so the water was like glass.  Except when a boat roared by.  Then we bobbed around in the wake for a bit.

One unexpected treat we had were the dolphins. They were frolicking around in the channel, sometimes quite close to us.  We could hear them breathe when they surfaced.  I tried to take a picture a couple times but really didn’t get a great shot.

One small channel we paddled into was very popular with fishermen.  And I could see why.  As we paddled along, we startled large schools of fish which would churn the water around our kayaks, making the water appear to be boiling.  The fishermen would drop their line in the water and have an almost immediate hit.  We saw some beautiful fish being pulled from the water.

Even in this smaller channel, the dolphins surfaced near our kayaks.  They probably were enjoying the fishing also.

The description of the paddling trail warned about getting lost, especially at low tide.  When I looked at this area from the air, that became apparent also, as this whole area is a maze of waterways, many of them becoming mud paths at low tide.  We had to turn around several times because of shallow water.  A few fishermen in an airboat simply plowed right through it.

We spent 3 1/2 hours on the water.  Even without doing the paddling trails, it was a fun paddle.

We drove back to the pickleball courts and found several were empty.  So we played several games with just the two of us.  

Now we’re back on the beach at Port Aransas, probably our last night here.  We’ll be moving on tomorrow.  

We saw a bunch of kites in the air on the beach and walked down there to take a look.  It may have been a vendor selling his wares, but it was a rather cool display, even from far away.

Corpus Christi

After taking a long walk on the beach this morning, we left our camping spot on the beach and headed towards Corpus Christi.  But first we stopped at the Donut Palace in town for some snack time delectables.  Their glazed cinnamon rolls are super good and we were happy to see on of these stores in Port Aransas after enjoying the one in Palacios.

We picked up supplies at a H.E.B. store in Corpus Christi and then stopped at a nearby Walmart and picked up ... wait for it ... pickleball paddles. Port Aransas has some nice pickleball courts at the community park so we thought we would play a little tomorrow.

Corpus Christi has a botanical garden which has a reciprocal agreement with the Meijer Gardens, where we have a membership.  It’s wintertime, so we weren’t expecting full bloom on the outdoor gardens, but we were less than impressed with this place.  They do have some indoor spaces, one of them dedicated to orchids, and, indeed, there were a few orchids blooming, but it appeared more like a commercial greenhouse than a garden, with all the orchids arranged in rows in plastic pots.  They also had a butterfly garden and we counted exactly one small butterfly flitting about.  Maybe I’m spoiled by the Meijer Gardens.  I’m sure they don’t have the budget of Meijer Gardens, or the space.  We didn’t spend a lot of time here.

We drove next to the USS ​Lexington​, an aircraft carrier that saw lots of action in World War II.  Always fascinating to go through these mammoth warships, seeing how they were built and how thousands of people lived and worked on them.  Deb had no desire to tour another warship, but went along anyway.  This time I was able to see the engine room.  When we toured the battleship USS ​North Carolina​ last fall, the engine room had been temporarily closed because a raccoon had gotten in the night before.

View from the bridge of the Lexington

On our way out of Corpus Christi, we stopped at a small Gyro restaurant for dinner.  This was only the second time we went out to eat in four weeks on the road.  We’ve had so many meals provided for us that it has been necessary to make as many meals as possible just to use up the food we have packed along.

We are now back on the beach in Port Aransas for another night. Tomorrow we may try some kayaking and some pickleball, depending on the weather.

I think we’ve covered the town of Port Aransas pretty well by walking, biking, or driving.  Particularly the beach.

Another Day in Port Aransas

Let’s see...  Port Aransas... The beach camping is great.  The weather is great.  The biking and beach walking are great.  ​Let’s hang out here another day​.  So we did.  Probably one of the longest times we have stayed in one place when on one of these trips.  Three days.  Must be a pretty cool place. Yep.

And today, being a Monday, it’s considerably quieter here than the last couple of days.  Now the weekenders are gone and the only people left are fishermen and retirees.

Today we hiked to the Port Aransas jetty and spent some time watching the dolphins and the pelicans and the boats.  Big boats.  Very big boats.  Although this one was a rowboat compared to the oil platform that moved through here yesterday.

Wow.  We’re really starting to act like retirees.

We biked to several areas in town: Roberts Point Park, Port Aransas Nature Preserve, the Joan and Scott Hold Paradise Pond, and of course the Port A Beach, where we have been camping out for the past three days.

Looking back at it, it appears that we didn’t really do much, but sometimes that’s the point. To slow down and enjoy the day and enjoy the area.  

A steady diet of this would probably eventually drive me nuts.  God didn’t put us on this earth to be on a perpetual vacation.  But He does give periods of rest and for that we are thankful.

Beach Day

We spent the entire day in one place.  Pretty unusual for us as we are usually moving somewhere.  However, this is a great place to camp out for a while and the weather is great so we’re hanging out here for a couple of days.  Our beach pass is good for the full year so we have lots of time.

Clear morning when we got up, clear and sunny all day.  As the day was dawning we identified several clusters of lights on the horizon as freight ships hanging out offshore.  There were at least eight of them that we could see and they didn’t appear to be moving. 

This was a little puzzling until a little later in the day when we saw a gigantic oil platform being towed out of the Aransas Pass channel by at least eight tugboats.  It was moving very slowly so I imagine it plugged up the channel for quite some time.

I suppose it would have been cool to have parked right by the channel and watched this monstrosity inch by, but it was large enough so that, even from a good mile away, we still had almost a front-row seat. (A large lens helped)

We streamed our church service from home and because of the time difference, it was all done by 10:30.  Then we took a long bike ride.  Ten miles down the beach we reached Mustang Island State Park.  We probably could have gone a lot further, but hunger pangs were setting in and we wanted to make sure we had enough battery power to get back as the wind was against us.  So we biked, a lot.  And we walked.  A lot.  A great way to enjoy the day at the beach.

We were even able to participate in our church quarterly meeting from a Texas beach.  How cool is that?

After dinner, just after it got dark, we took one last walk.  This time it was into the town of Port Aransas.  We walked through the streets of vacation homes and eventually made it to the main street, coming out by a Dollar General store and a Sonic drive-in.  ​Sonic.  They serve ice cream.​  It didn’t take much convincing for either of us to get us to stand in one of the auto parking spots and push the red button to order a couple of their Blast ice cream desserts. Still prefer Culver’s or even Dairy Queen over this, but it was ice cream and it was here, so we took full advantage of it.  Since they had no place to sit, we ate our treats sitting on the curb at the Dollar General.

I was halfway through writing this when Deb looked out the window and saw the moon rising over the water.  She called me over to the back window and I saw this big orange moon just coming up over the water.  I grabbed the camera and tripod and went outside to try to capture this.  Very difficult shot to get and this is the combination of two pictures at two different exposure levels, but it does get pretty close to what we could see.  A great picture to end the day.

Camping on the Beach

The rain ended sometime during the night.  I had put the awning partly down in a futile effort to protect the bikes, however the wind started picking up and at 3am I was awaked by a ferocious flapping noise. The awning was flopping up and down furiously in the high wind. I managed to roll it up and went back to bed.  At 4:30am I was awakened again by a low-pitched howling noise which rose and fell.  It took me a bit to figure out that the wind, even stronger now, was causing one of the bike rack straps to vibrate.  Back outside to tie that strap down with a bungee cord then back to bed.  Sleep didn’t come easy after that.

So now the rain is replaced by wind.  At least there was sunshine today.

We took a bike ride this morning, riding six miles south to Indianola, which is mainly a small fishing marina at the end of Ocean Drive.  With the wind at our backs it took zero effort to pedal that distance.  On the way there were several historical markers, detailing the local history.  One that I thought was interesting was the importation of 75 camels in the 1850’s for use as pack animals in the desert southwest.  One of their tasks in 1857, along with traditional livestock, was to survey the great wagon road between Arizona and California, now known as Route 66.

So if you ever drive Route 66, you can thank a camel for its contribution.

The ride back to the RV was directly against the wind and we greatly appreciated electric bikes, without which we would have been walking.

We left our beach parking spot and drove south to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.  This refuge is known for its small population of Whooping Cranes.  Although about 800 birds are known to exist worldwide, the population was down to about 15 birds in 1941, all located at this refuge.  So it was a real treat to actually see a couple cranes in the distance.

On our hike we also saw other birds, mostly in the distance and we watched this guy, a reddish egret, do his dance for a while.

We left the RV at the visitor center and took the bikes to the trailhead.  Turns out this was a good choice as there was no good parking for an RV in this refuge.

Aransas is a beautiful place, well worth the visit.  And we were blessed with a beautiful day to visit the refuge.  If you are into birds, it is really a good place to visit.  We talked to a couple avid birders bristling with big cameras and spotting scopes who were telling us all about the whooping cranes.

We also managed to see a javelina (looks like a small pig) grazing right along the main road.  I had stopped about 10 yards away and was getting out my camera when a car passed us and stopped right next to it and scared it away.  The car had arms and cell phone cameras poking out all the windows but I don’t think they got a good picture.  And I didn’t get a picture at all.

We took our bikes down the auto loop road, a 9-mile one-way road that loops through the park.  Because of the high vegetation on both sides of the road, we couldn’t see very far, but it was a very pleasant bike ride as there was only one other car on the road.  We had the whole place to ourselves.

Leaving the Aransas refuge we had quite a bit we wanted to do, but not enough daylight to do it.  We wanted to spend some time in Rockport, but that may have to wait for next time.  We decided to make for Port A Beach, right next to the town of Port Aransas.  This involved taking the causeway and the ferry from Aransas Pass.  The ferries run quite often, so it didn’t take long at all and we managed to park the RV on the Port A beach just as it was getting dark.  We had to stop on the way and purchase a beach pass for $12, and that pass is good for all of 2024, so we should be set if we want to come back here this year.

So now we’re on another beach with the sound of the surf directly behind us.  Hopefully this will be a better night of sleep than last night.

On the Road Again

We took leave of Palacios today.  Always a little bittersweet when you’ve worked alongside these people for three weeks to leave.  We may not see them for a long time, some of them we may not see again on this side of glory, but we still count them as friends.

This project (probably like any project) had its high points and low points.  Definitely a low point was the weather.  It was a challenge.  We had a couple really great days, several OK days, and six days that were challenging.  Three of those days were marked by way colder than normal temperatures and the other three were inundated by rain. But we don’t control the weather and the work went on in spite of it, so we prevailed.

The location was great.  The camp sits on a point in the bay, allowing great views of both the sunrise and sunset.  It’s very walkable and bikeable, unfortunately the weather kept the bikes at home most of the time.  And the salty air was hard on the bikes, causing nearly instant rust in several locations.  It’s gonna take some clean-up when we get home.

Our group leader was outstanding.  He made sure there was adequate work by coordinating with the camp director every day, he encouraged us every morning in the group meetings, he pitched right in with the work; just above and beyond.  His wife made sure there was a table laden with snacks for break time.  She coordinated the women’s work.  Together they arranged the game nights and the potluck night.

The group leader for a project is simply the first person that signs up, so there is a real possibility that I would be group leader for a future project.  I’m taking notes...

The camp provided lunch every work day.  That was quite a treat to just come in and sit down and eat.  Plus there was the added benefit of additional shared time together.  Lunches would normally be taken in our individual RVs.  Here it was together in the dining hall.  It was kind-of like going to camp all over again.

It takes several days to get to know the people we are working with.  Especially some of the quieter ones.  One of the guys appeared to be just a more serious, quiet kind of guy.  By the end I was really appreciating his wicked sense of humor.  They all come from very different backgrounds.  Some (including one of the women) have military experience.  Several were farm boys.  One was an aeronautical engineer.  One was a school administrator.  One was a plumber. We had one familiar with office accounting.  A couple of homeschool moms. But we were all united with some common bonds: a love for Jesus, a love of travel, and a desire to work.

So now we have to figure out where the next project is going to be.

After a leisurely breakfast, including one of those Melogold grapefruits, we took off, heading south.  Our first stop was about two miles from camp, at the Donut Palace, where we picked up a cinnamon swirl and a cinnamon twist.  Really looking forward to snack time when we’ll eat these delectables.

Now that the project is done, we are going into slow-travel mode.  We ended up at Magnolia Beach, for a total travel distance today of 44 miles.  Magnolia Beach is one of the few places that allows camping on the beach, so here we are, gonna do the camping-on-the-beach thing again.  We parked the RV less than 10 feet from the water and took a long walk on the beach.

Today started out sunny but started to cloud over as the day went on.  By lunch time we had put the sunglasses away.  The forecast called for a chance of rain after 4pm so we decided to get a bike ride in before then.

I got the bikes all unpacked and we were less than a mile down the road when I started noticing water spattering my glasses.  It turned in to a light drizzle that was not going to go away so we finally turned around and rode back to the RV.

The drizzle turned into a heavier drizzle that lasted most of the afternoon.  So we didn’t get our bike ride in for the day.  We spent the time catching up on communication, doing Bible study, and planning.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

The End of the Project

Last day of work today.  And it was a much better day than the last several.  We managed to get a lot of work done in spite of the rain, but it does wear on a person.  The continual slogging through standing water.  Tracking all that wet grime inside the RV.  Days of 100% humidity where everything feels damp and nothing dries out.  I’m not complaining, but when the sun comes out and the water starts to recede, it just makes for a better day.

And today was a beautiful one.  Sunny, upper 60’s.  Uncharacteristically calm.  Several of the women were able to observe a few dolphins surfacing very close to shore for a good half hour.

Our plumbing guys managed to complete the task they started yesterday.  The only thing left is to mount a mirror back on the wall.  I ran through a list of little details.  Smoke alarm batteries that the women were unable to reach.  Several lights that didn’t work.

We spent a good part of the afternoon moving all the furniture out of the eight hotel rooms that were flooded when pipe fittings split.  We tried to dry the carpet out, but with the rains and high humidity that proved nearly impossible.  Those carpets will probably all have to be replaced.   Probably a task for another group of SOWERs.

We loaded all the furniture on a trailer and put it in one of the gathering rooms of another lodge.  At some point, another group is going to have to move all this back.

The women scrubbed all the bubbling water seal off the benches that they had just put on.  They weren’t too happy with the news that this had to be done, but they got it done.

They also roved around the camp again and picked up sticks and debris.  Again, I think this was an excuse to drive the golf cars.  This time, they took the limousine.  They had great fun until the battery ran dead.

We had our last lunch served by the cooking staff here at camp.  We got so spoiled here, with all the lunches provided for us.  Just show up and sit down and eat.  And the meals were delicious.  From here on out we will have to make everything ourselves.  Gotta get used to that all over again.

We gathered together at 3:30 for a wrap-up meeting.  Everyone received a Pay Day candy bar (we are volunteers, after all).

Two couples are staying here for another month. A few more are going on to different projects, and some of us are heading for home.  Always a little hard to say goodbye to these friends we have made over the last few weeks.

A few of us gathered on lawn chairs outside and enjoyed some conversation and especially the sunshine.  We shared RV stories, SOWER stories and other stories, enjoying the time to just sit and talk.

After dinner we gathered for the last game night.  Since there were no benches in the Tabernacle, we set up the Pickleball nets and played some Pickleball for a while.  I can see why this is such a popular activity.  It is a lot of fun without being too strenuous.  Perfect for us old people.

Deb and I took a walk after the games ended.  It was a pleasant evening and very calm.  Almost weird to have it so calm as the wind blows so much around here.

Tomorrow we leave for parts unknown.  Hard to believe that our fourth SOWERs project is now in the books.

More Rain

It rained today.  A lot.  But not continually.  It was like squalls that dumped barrels of rain periodically throughout the day.  When Deb took a walk this afternoon, she could see the weather pattern in the sky and it looked like the same system just came back around several times, dumping its rain on us again and again.  There was a couple of times when I would just stand under a roof overhang, watching the water shoot off the roof, waiting for the deluge to pass before continuing work.

There is standing water everywhere.  The RV’s are parked in the best part of the RV section, and even so, a couple are nearly completely surrounded by water.  Kind of like your own private island.

Probably better than other parts of the RV section.  There it’s just a lake.

With only two days left, it’s time to start winding things up.  So, lots of smaller projects to do.  Only there are still some big ones.  In two identical buildings, the complaint was that there was no hot water for the sinks in one of the bathrooms.  We discovered that hot water had never been plumbed to the sinks when the building was built.  So, with two days left, three of the guys were tapping into a hot water line, running new plumbing down a wall, and fixing that situation. They think they can get it done by tomorrow.

Troy and I were back in the conference center.  We had taken the scaffolding down yesterday and then discovered we had forgotten to patch the hole near the ceiling.  So, first thing today, we put up the scaffolding again so we could make the repair.  We also repaired the holes we had dug in the wall to get the snake out.

The women went through all the buildings making sure all the lights worked and changing all the smoke alarm batteries and any dead light bulbs.  They noted anything that needed additional repair.  Our list is now getting longer.  We learned this evening that the benches they had spent quite a bit of time on need to be redone.  They were told to put two coats of water seal on the benches. The instructions on the can tell you to use only one coat.  So many of the benches bubbled up and turned white in spots.  I wonder how they will take the news of the do-over tomorrow morning...

We had dinner with Kenneth and Lisa, our group leaders.  They are possibly planning a trip to Michigan and we gave them all kinds of places to visit and things to do.  Gotta sell them on our state.  Texas in the winter may be a good place to be (when it’s not raining), but Michigan summers are great.

The Snake

I finished the video collage I was working on after finally getting a group photo.  Here we are...

And here is the video:

Today wasn’t quite so rainy as yesterday, for which we were grateful. We could get around without getting soaked if you avoided the big puddles all over the place.

A couple guys used the opportunity to redistribute all of the benches that the women had refinished. Our master plumber, Daniel, worked on plumbing (of course). Seems like there’s always plumbing to work on in a place like this.

Troy and I set about trying to figure out why the outlet behind the drinking fountain in the Tabernacle was shorted.  We pulled the entire unit off the wall, pulled out the outlet that was behind it and then I received a nasty poke when trying to take a wire off.  Turns out this was on an entirely different circuit and I had foolishly assumed this wire was dead.  I should have tested it first.

So the mystery electrical problem still remains at the Tabernacle.  One wire that goes somewhere that is shorted.  We don’t know where it goes and everything we looked at in this part of the building works.  We finally buttoned everything up and moved on.  Next task, The Snake.

We now had a scissor lift at our disposal, so I drove it, at a blistering two miles per hour, across the entire camp from the Tabernacle to the Thibodeaux Conference Center, hoping I wouldn’t get it stuck in the many puddles on the way.

The snake, a thick cable for the sound system, ran through the ceiling rafters from the front of the auditorium to the back.  I had already pulled the section from its hiding place above the women’s restroom into the attic, we just needed something tall enough to pull it off the rafters all the way to the front.  That was easy enough and soon we had it nearly completely out of the ceiling except for the very front where it disappeared into the wall.  Since that was above the stage and we couldn’t get the lift on the stage, we couldn’t reach it.

The camp also had a bunch of scaffolding which we hauled out of storage, setting up three sections on top of each other on the stage to get at the last portion running down inside the wall.  That last section proved to be the most difficult.  For some reason, whoever installed this decided to loop several feet of cable up and down inside the wall, making it impossible to just pull the cable through.  We had to peel the video screen off the wall and cut a hole in the wall to get at it.  And even then, because of other stuff, both plumbing and electrical, in the same wall cavity, the cable did not come through easy.  And all 200 feet had to come down that wall.

It took us the rest of the day to get it out.  Now there’s another task to do: patching up the holes.  Some projects just grow way beyond original estimates.

Some of the women finished the kitchen pantry.  It was a thing of beauty once it was done.

Deb and Lisa went around the camp and picked up some of the sticks and old palm fronds that had blown down the last several days.  I think that was an excuse to drive the golf cart around.  They were having way too much fun.

We all gathered for our potluck dinner this evening and enjoyed each other’s cooking and fellowship.  Having the camp kitchen available for warming stuff and serving up helped greatly as RV kitchen facilities are very limited.

We took a walk after dinner to walk of some of the mountains of food we had just eaten.  It was kind of like walking through the scene of some scary movie.  The mist hanging over the water with the lights shining through it gave kind of an other-worldly feel.  Main Street was completely deserted and was itself a little spooky.  Big wide road and absolutely no traffic.

The Christmas decorations in this town are rather unique.  Sharks.   Don’t know if I have ever seen anything quite like it.

Rain

The forecast calls for rain for the next several days.  Heavy rain at times.  Today it was 1 or 2 inches.  And I’m sure we got it.  The rain started in earnest as we were walking to the cafeteria for morning devotions. The roar of the downpour on the metal roof of the building made it hard to hear what was being said.

Naturally, the inside jobs are the ones that were given priority.  The problem was: getting from one inside job to another required one to travel outside, so we still managed to get wet.  This area is so flat that the water just pools, resulting in flooding all over the place.  So getting around without running into one of those large puddles was a challenge.

A few of us finished the trim around the air conditioner in the kitchen pantry room and then a few of the women spent some time rearranging and returning all the stuff that had been removed from that room prior to cutting a big hole in the wall.  Kind of a big job since that room was packed full of stuff.  It also needed a good cleaning since we created a lot of dust when cutting that big hole.

I should have taken an after-picture. Once all the stuff was back in the room, the shelves were piled high to the ceiling.

The job list seems to be getting longer, but the items take less time.  I replaced a pressure relief valve on a water heater, and fixed up a loose door handle.  I also helped Bob in the snack shack as he was cutting the hole for our last air conditioner installation.  This one was a challenge because one large air conditioner is replacing two smaller ones, and the holes for the two did not line up to make the larger hole.  So a lot of cutting and patching in this wall.

I found out that there was another plumbing break over the weekend.  We were gone but Daniel and Michael spent a good part of yesterday morning mopping up the water in three more hotel rooms after a shower connection split.  So I missed all that excitement.  Daniel, our master plumber, has his hands full on this project.  There seem to be a lot of leaky showers he has been working on.

A little bit less rain this afternoon so there were a few times when I was able to walk to the shop without getting wet.

A few of the women went to Blessing for a tour of the Hotel Blessing, which is the place we went to for a fantastic chicken dinner the first Saturday we were here.  It turns out they were not able to see much of the hotel, but Deb got her money’s worth by asking lots of questions.  So she is now an expert on the local lore of Blessing and Palacios, of the Hotel Blessing and the Hotel Luther, an abandoned hotel which is just a short walk from the camp.

And now we are steaming up the RV boiling down apples to make applesauce for tomorrow’s potluck.  That’s a Thing with these kinds of groups: have a potluck on one of the evenings.  Only our RV is not set up for potluck preparation.  The stove is tiny, we don’t have an oven, there is no refrigerator space, and no prep space.  We’ll end up storing the finished applesauce in one of the refrigerators in the cafeteria.  But we do it for the fellowship.

Sunday

Not a lot going on today.  Maybe that’s what a day of rest is all about.  We walked the 12 blocks to Trinity Baptist Church.  Very good sermon on Exodus 15.  God has a route mapped out for his people. It may not make sense to us and we may not like it very much, but those are His plans, not ours.  He took Israel out of Egypt to a seemingly dead end at the Red Sea.  It didn’t make sense to them, but they were soon able to see his deliverance in a powerful way.  They were told to stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord.  How often do we want to take matters into our own hands, to get impatient, and not wait for the salvation of the Lord.

The deep freeze is over, but the new weather du jour is rain.  It was just starting as we walked home from church and it’s supposed to rain, sometimes significantly, for the next few days. 

This rain and wind just drives everyone inside so there’s not a lot happening outside.  We used the afternoon to do inside stuff, reading, computer work, and the like.  I’m working on a video collage of this project which I’ll probably make available later this week.  We also had a sibling group call with my siblings, always good to catch up with family.

Tomorrow begins our last week here.  I see that there are packages containing two more air conditioners waiting on the front step of the camp office.  I would imagine that will be in our task list starting tomorrow.  After that, who knows?  We’ve managed to knock off just about all of the major stuff on the list. So I’m not sure what all we will be doing this week.

Be Careful Opening the Overhead Bins

Be careful opening the overhead bins, as contents may have shifted during flight.

If you do any amount of flying, you’ve heard these words just before disembarking.  If you fly a lot, you tune them out as you have heard them so often.

If you drive an RV, these words are just as relevant, perhaps even more so, because so many contents may have shifted during flight.

Today was a content-shifting day.  I don’t recall it being particularly bumpy, but we did have a couple curb cutouts that caused the RV to sway side-to-side a little more than usual.  I always have to take those entry roads into gas stations or grocery stores quite slowly as some of them will have a bit of a low spot or a bump which may cause the RV to rock like a ship in a tempestuous sea.

Anyway, at lunch time I opened the refrigerator and an entire shelf in the door collapsed and clattered to the floor.  Fortunately, its contents were mostly bottles of sauce and a couple sticks of hard butter which made a lot of noise but didn’t result in any damage.  One thing, though, was included in that cascade: a cucumber which Deb has been unable to find for three weeks.  Must have been buried under the butter.  The cucumber managed to hit every wall protrusion on the way down, leaving a piece of itself behind at each one before finally mashing itself to the floor.

We stopped at a small park to make dinner later on and Deb had just put a bunch of veggies to fry on the stove when she opened the door above the sink.  Out came the only glass thing that was in there: a small bowl she uses for breakfast.  It hit the sink cover and shattered into a million pieces.  The blast radius wasn’t all that large, but when you live in a space of about a hundred square feet, that small blast radius covers a lot of stuff: the entire galley, including the pan of food on the stove, most of the floor, some of the bathroom, and, as we later found out most of the bed.  We were looking forward to having those veggies but had to throw them away.  Fortunately, the brats were on the grill outside and were unaffected, so we at least had those.  So dinner was a bit smaller than planned and the cleanup was a lot more extensive.

This just reiterated for us the rule of thumb that we too often ignore: don’t use glass containers in an RV.

At breakfast this morning we found out there is a difference between a Pomelo and a Melogold.  We picked up two Pomelos yesterday and found that they may look alike on the outside, but a Pomelo has a rind about an inch thick.  It was still very good, but we felt like we got less than we bargained for.  A Melogold is a cross between a pomelo and a grapefruit and you get much more fruit for the money.  We’ll look a little more carefully next time.

After breakfast we took a walk through the state park and ended up back at the mission.  There was a volunteer there who talked with us about some of the things in the museum and then followed us out to the next building where there was a display of some of the skills that were taught by the missionaries.  One of those was weaving.  This woman was passionate about weaving and is a member of a weaver’s guild and has looms of her own.  She talked with us at length about the looms there, how they worked, how the thread for the weaving was spun and colored.  We got our own personal presentation and tour of the various weaving machinery here.

Several of the colors are made using a bug found on the prickly pear cactus.  The cochineal is a tiny little red bug that makes a red dye when boiled.  Adding other items to the mix can change the color so it was used for several natural dye colors. During colonial times, the Spanish had a monopoly on this now-popular product for nearly a century.  It was second only to silver and gold in value and was frequently the target of pirates.

And yet it’s just a bug.

By the time we got out of here it was after lunch.  Where does the day go?

We stopped at a couple different mission sites, both reconstructed and still in ruins.  We’re finding out that there is a lot more to Texas history than just the Alamo.  The normal history books don’t cover much of it so we were mostly unfamiliar with the players and the places and events.  So we were playing catch-up when reading some of the signs in these museums.

On the way back to Palacios, we stopped in Victoria to pick up some groceries.  It was a bit late in the day to do the driving tour of the historic homes downtown so we just concentrated on supplying ourselves for the next week or so.  We made sure we picked up a couple of Melogolds this time.  We want to enjoy those a couple more times.

After the glass bowl explosion and the reduced dinner size, we decided to stop at the Dairy Queen in Palacios and drown our sorrows in a medium Blizzard.  Ice cream always helps, especially when mixed with little crunchies like M&Ms.

Traveling Texas

Two weeks are now complete. Time flies.  After some deliberation we decided to head a little farther south this weekend, towards Goliad State Park.  Lots of history in that area, plus there’s a paddle trail on the San Antonio River that looked interesting.

So we were on the road by 9am and made our first stop just two miles from the camp, at the Donut Palace.  Can’t leave a good donut store unpatronized.  We came away with snacks for later on in the morning.

In Port Lavaca, we happened upon a H.E.B. grocery store and just had to stop.  We picked up a couple more basketball-sized grapefruits (the receipt calls them Pummelos) and also a package of Southwest flour tortillas, along with some other groceries.  There were flour tortillas and Southwest flour tortillas and a few other types of tortillas, all made by hand in-house.  Kind of a specialty here.  We decided to try the Southwest ones as they appear to be spiced up a bit.

When we arrived at Goliad State Park we used a couple of these to roll up some smoked chicken, bacon and cheese into sort-of a quesadilla and heated it on the panini maker.  Add a little cherry salsa and it was a fantastic lunch.

Today is the warmest day of the weekend, reaching a high of 53 degrees, so we wanted to get some kayaking in.  The state park is a take-out point for a paddle trail on the San Antonio River.  We drove to the 57th Street bridge, a put-in spot just under seven miles up the river and made it on to the water at just after 1pm.  Must be that most Texans prefer warmer weather as we were the only ones on the river.  Very nice river, no big obstructions, decent current, very peaceful.  We did the 6.8 miles in about two hours.

We are camping here at the State Park overnight.  When we got to our site, we had a few more tortillas, this time stuffed with pulled pork, sautéed onions, and BBQ sauce.  Another great variation on the theme.

Tomorrow we’ll probably explore some of the Spanish missions and other history of this area before heading back to the camp in the evening. We were just a bit late getting back from kayaking to see the mission on the State Park property.  The Mission Espíritu Santo is a prominent structure, a reconstructed version of the 1749 mission.  It was one of the most successful missions in Texas.  One of the things the people in the mission did is to keep cattle and this mission is considered the birthplace of cattle ranching.  We’ll probably learn some more fun facts tomorrow.

Photo Credit: National Park Service Web Site

Two Steps Back

The day started out innocently enough.  After devotions, we reviewed the list of tasks which had grown since yesterday.  Then we split up to our assigned tasks.  I was going to remove the snake from the conference center but first drove the golf cart to the Snack Shack to see if Daniel and Bob needed any help installing the air conditioner in that building.  As I approached the building, I dismissed it right away, but something in my brain told me that something was not right.  The parking area between the Snack Shack and the Bayview Motel rooms was wet, complete with some significant puddles.  The not-right part of that was that it did not rain last night.

The door to room 7 of Bayview was open and, looking in, I could see the sheen of a quarter inch of water over the carpeted floor.  A couple days ago, the shower valve in that room had been replaced because of a leak and one of the new couplings used in the fix had split sometime during the night last night and flooded that room.  And it wasn’t due to weather.  Last night it only got down to about 47 degrees.

Not only had it flooded this room, but it flooded two rooms to the right and two rooms to the left.  The water in the parking area was the result of the water running out of the entry doors.

Daniel and Bob did most of the work removing the water using a shop vac and a carpet shampoo machine.  Bucket after bucket of water came out.  Most of the furniture came out also, and fans and heaters and anything that would move air was employed to help dry things out.

They eventually put all the mattresses in a dry room and the remaining furniture under the roof of the Snack Shack until the rooms could dry out.  Needless to say, the items on their agenda didn’t get done.

I went to remove the snake from the conference center and was eventually stymied by not having a tall enough ladder.  We may get a lift on Monday.  I also removed a low-hanging telephone line near the RV area that tended to catch on tall fifth-wheel trailers.  Paul fixed up some loose stairs on the west side of the cafeteria, Kenny painted all the outside trim of the eight air conditioners we installed last week, and John, Kenneth, and Troy worked out framing out a hole for the air conditioner in the kitchen pantry.  Despite taking two steps back on the shower fix in Bayview Room 7, there was forward progress in other areas.

Several of the women painted the Nine-Square game, as the lines and numbers and arrows had all been worn off by the weather.

We are treated well here.  In addition to the fantastic lunches we have been enjoying (they are really dinners served at noon), break time is also a feast, with fruit and cookies and chocolate and all kinds of delectables.

At lunch time today, we were treated with a special treat.  Rob, the camp director, has us all over to his house for a lunch of sandwiches and two-by-four soup.  Built in 1906, this house is part of the camp and has quite a bit of history and character in it.  One of the fun features of this house is a slide next to the stairway going to the second floor.  An honest to goodness metal scorch-your-legs-on-a-hot-day slide. Most of us had to try it out.  It isn’t every day you are in a house with a slide.  Makes you feel like a kid again.

Thursday night is game night and we enjoyed fellowship over Five Crowns, Scrabble, and Pegs and Jokers.