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.