Game Drive

We streamed our church service this morning, right here in the Bass Pro Shop parking lot.  Very good sermon series on the Song of Solomon.  Not the same as being there.  Somehow, standing in a small RV and singing along with the group pictured on an iPad just doesn’t to it justice.   Much better to be in the room.

I wonder sometimes if that’s similar to our situation here on earth. Our praise and worship is just a dim picture of what it will be like when we finally get to heaven.  We are on a journey, and we worship from afar. But one day, we will worship standing at the feet of Jesus.  In the same room.  What a day that will be!

I was also reminded not of who I am, but of whose I am in one of the songs I self-consciously sung in front of that iPad this morning.

Mine are days that God has numbered
I was made to walk with Him
Yet I look for worldly treasure
And forsake the King of kings

But mine is hope in my Redeemer
Though I fall, His love is sure
For Christ has paid for every failing
I am His forevermore

The song goes on describing our assurance of salvation, the strength that is ours through Him, and our sure hope.  It brought tears to my eyes.

Because of the time difference, the service was done by 9am.  I guess you can say this was the early service.  We drove the short distance to the Texas Information Center where Deb loaded up with her usual pile of brochures and maps of various attractions in the area.  We also plied the woman there with lots of questions.  She was very helpful.

We stopped at a nearby street vendor and picked up a ten-pound bag of grapefruits for seven bucks.  We’ll see if these are as good as the more expensive ones we bought at H-E-B.

We then drove down the street a couple miles to a gas station that also has propane.  After nearly five weeks on the road, our propane was running a little low.  I felt sorry for the gal behind the counter, she obviously had no idea how to fill an RV propane tank.  Her training must have only been with BBQ grill tanks.  So I had to help her out.  She didn’t even reset the meter when she started.  I made a mental note of it, and saw that it was about eleven gallons of propane, but she charged me the standard BBQ grill tank fill-up fee.  I tried to tell her this was not a standard tank, but the communication gap, plus the super loud Spanish music playing in the store made communication difficult.  In the end I paid 19 bucks for 11 gallons of propane.  That’s $1.72 per gallon.  At home it’s $3.99 per gallon.

Next stop was Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.  All the buildings were closed because this was a Sunday, but the park is open every day.  We first biked to an Osprey overlook next to Laguna Atascosa (the lake from which the park gets its name), and nearby Gator Pond.  Gator Pond was just a couple small mud puddles and Laguna Atascosa was a very brown color, perhaps stirred up by the high winds.  There certainly weren’t any gators in Gator Pond and we didn’t see any Osprey from Osprey Overlook.  We came back to the RV and had lunch, wondering if we would see any wildlife in this wildlife refuge.

After lunch we biked the Steve Thompson Wildlife Drive, a 14-mile loop through the park. The heat of the day and the flat, often rather barren landscape reminded me of some of the game drives I went on when I was in Kenya last March.  So it felt a little like a bike safari.  And we finally spotted some game.  A large gazelle, called the nilgai, was introduced in the 1920’s by King Ranch as a game animal and now number in the tens of thousands in Southern Texas.  We saw a few of these at an extreme distance, identifying them only with binoculars.  And we usually only saw the back end of them as they bounded away.  Most of the time they were a dot on the horizon and they still moved away.  Either they have very good senses, or they have a healthy fear of dots on the horizon.

I learned later that both of these are true, making these a very challenging animal to hunt. They have a keen sense of smell and very good eyesight and are very wary.  The meat is supposed to be very lean but very good.   Maybe we’ll have to find a place that serves nilgai for dinner.  I’m curious to try it out.

This loop follows the shoreline of Laguna Madre for a few miles and South Padre Island can be seen across the waters.  We won’t be visiting South Padre Island.  From the looks of it, it’s all resort beaches and high-rises.  Padre Island was much more my speed.

On the way back into town, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial.  This is the “original” sculpture, the plaster version used to cast the bronze sculpture that is in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC.  Under the shadow of this, we made dinner:  King Ranch Casserole.

Deb found the recipe on the internet after reading about it yesterday when we went though King Ranch.  She decided to try it out.  She had to substitute a few things but in the end it turned out to be very good.  A real Texas dinner.

With the last light of the day, we took a walk in Hugh Ramsey Nature Park, just a couple miles from the Iwo Jima memorial.  Nice little park with lots of little trail stubs leading to ponds or bird viewing areas.  Appears to be rather popular with the locals also.  The heat of the day was finally gone (I’m still trying to wrap my brain around an 83-degree day in early February), and the decreasing breeze made for a pleasant walk.

We’re spending one more night here at the Bass Pro Shop before doing our last leg south.  We’re hitting the border at Progreso and doing a little shopping in Nuevo Progreso, Mexico, along with a little medical tourism.  After that, we’ll start to meander north.

And meander we tend to do.  I plotted the route through Texas so far and it is by no means a straight line.