Blessings

The first Saturday at a project is usually a good opportunity to discover the unique things about the area.  And today was no exception.  The weather cooperated, touching 70 degrees and generally sunny all day.

I got out the drone to take some aerial photos and discovered right away that this camp is partly in the flight path of the nearby municipal airport, so flying an unmanned aircraft in this zone requires special permission, which I didn’t have.  So my flights were limited to part of the camp and some of the water off to the east.  I got a few pictures from that perspective.

I took a few more pictures from a kayak later on in the day, a far different perspective.

This is probably 22 acres of the nicest property in town.  I guess when you set up shop in 1902, you have the pick of the property.

We took a bike ride around town later on in the morning, found the local donut shop.  We’ll be back there.  On our last trip to North Carolina, we never did find a place to get donuts.  Here, they seem to be all over the place. We also biked past the shipyard where all the shrimping boats were moored.  Palacios is the shrimp capital of Texas, and Deb was looking forward to  getting some shrimp right off the boat.  But there was no activity here except for one guy painting his building.  When asked, he told us that it is the off-season and we wouldn’t find any shrimp other than frozen in 10-pound lots.  That’s why none of the boats are out.

For lunch we drove the 12 miles to Blessing, Texas, and had lunch at the Hotel Blessing.  These are the kind of places that are fun to find and even more fun to eat at.  About as far removed from a restaurant chain as you can get.  Miss Helen has been running this restaurant since the late 60’s and still is out there every day except Christmas.  This place has quite a following.  It’s a thing to gather with a bunch of buddies and all ride your motorcycles out to the Hotel Blessing for Miss Helen’s lunch.  People come from all over.

They come for the fried chicken.  It is amazing.  Pro tip: skip everything else and load up the plate with fried chicken. You won’t be disappointed.

We came in like newbies not knowing what to expect.  One of the patrons saw us standing around and told us to just go grab some food from the buffet and then settle up when done.  The buffet is a whole bunch of pans sitting on two old stoves and the rest of the place is as unassuming as the buffet line.  Fantastic meal, definitely worth repeating.  What fun.

We drove to the nearby boat launch and put the kayaks in the water.  We paddled across the bay, a distance of about a mile, and then back again.  We had to work off all that fried chicken somehow.

Since we had a big lunch, we were going to just go simple for supper, but we got into a conversation with our GL who invited us over for dinner.  So our simple meal turned into smoked brisket, and we sat and talked for quite a while.  That’s one thing that is neat about these projects, we meet some very interesting people and make some good friends at each project.  Well worth the drive to Texas.