Hurricane Harvey Came Calling Here Port Aransas, on Mustang Island, has a commercial road, a state highway, in the middle of the island that is lined with strip malls and restaurants and big beach shops with eye-catching decorations like a giant shark, a lighthouse, and two large wooden statues of sea captain. East of that road, toward the gulf, there are many, many little enclaves of beach houses and near-beach houses, condo buildings, and a few hotels and resorts. West of the main road, there’s a lot of wetlands and right across from where we are, there is an airport. But there’s also a whole lot of empty spaces. You enter this store through the belly of the beast We're gonna need a bigger boat! Lighting the way to t-shirts and boogie boards     So I was interested in finding something out about the history of the town and the island, and I discovered that it was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017—not that long ago—and that most of the old town that had...

 We settled in at site X-1 at the On The Beach RV park. I think we got this site—kind of off by itself—because not many of the RVs here would fit in it. They are a social bunch around here; we went to a coffee & donuts morning and also signed up for the Christmas Day potluck dinner. I started thinking about what I could possibly make for a crowd with two stove burners and no oven (more on that later). Set up in our own little corner of the campground We walk down along the beach almost every day; I tried riding a bike on the packed sand road down there, but it’s not packed quite hard enough, I came close to wiping out. But the island is still nice for bike riding; they have wide sidewalks that are dedicated to walkers and bikers—which means no golf carts are allowed. There are still lots of golf carts on the roads and especially on the beach road. But I’ve ridden my bike down Eleventh Street—one over from the main drag on the island—with almost no traffic. There was quite ...

 We had a nice time doing not much with our friends the Michels at their new house in Katy, Texas. They have a lovely swimming pool, but it was never quite warm enough to have a swim. It was always fairly warm during the day, but there was intermittent rain, and just generally cool, unless there was direct sunlight. Interesting array of temperatures. The inviting swimming pool at the Michels' house We ate well and hung out with the dogs, Bella and Kassie. Both of them are very sweet, although taking a walk with them can be an adventure. But hey, we’re out on the road for adventure. The neighborhood they live in is within the huge Cinco Ranch development, which was built in the 1990s, I am told, on a surprisingly human scale for as big as it is. (I swear we’ve driven miles in any direction and still been within Cinco Ranch’s borders.) But the individual neighborhoods within the development are surprisingly walkable. We walked to a kolache shop and enjoyed those delicious Czech ver...

  Galveston, oh Galveston I still hear your sea waves crashing The waves weren’t crashing too badly, but it was a gray and stormy morning when we drove down to the tip of the Bolivar Peninsula and caught the ferry over to Galveston—it takes a little longer than the Anderson Ferry crossing the Ohio River, and the other big difference was there were dolphins following alongside the big ferry boat the whole way. We also dodged a couple of big ocean-going ships, which wasn’t much different than the Deborah Ann negotiating around the big barges on the Ohio. But I always enjoy a nice ferry ride, especially when it’s considered part of the highway system and it’s free. The view from the ferry heading from the Bolivar Peninsula to Galveston Island Galveston was an interesting place. Not exactly as I’d imagined it from the song, and from editing many Texas history books that go into detail about how the commission form of city government was created in Galveston after the devastating 190...

 The day after our intriguing tour of New Orleans, we had another day to spend in the city, and after considering our choices—having found that you can actually park in town, and it’s not quite as difficult to traverse as we may have thought—we decided to go back to City Park for the day. It is a real jewel; we’ve wandered through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York, and I’ll tell you, New Orleans’ City Park has them beat.  City Park in New Orleans The park is really lovely, full of live oaks (many of which were planted after Katrina, when a lot of them were lost, but quite a large number of them survived and are the biggest and oldest in the park). It also has a lot of things to do, not just soccer fields and a rugby pitch, golf course and frisbee golf course, and those kind of usual things. There’s also the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), a botanical garden, a lovely sculpture garden, and Story Land (not to be confused with Storyville), a mini ki...

  From Waveland, we turned west again and got caught in a just-slowly-moving traffic jam from the outskirts of town to the Louisiana border. We figured it was a combination of people returning from Thanksgiving journeys and folks heading to the Saints game in New Orleans. We stopped in Sliddel, a town north of New Orleans, and checked into a motel to consider our next move. They had a laundry room so that worked out well. We decided to try an RV park in New Orleans, but not in the city proper. From Sliddel, it was only about a 35-minute trip down I-10, where we got off on a very industrial looking road. We were definitely rethinking our decision, but when we got to the New Orleans RV Resort & Marina, it looked fine and we signed up for three nights. It's on the Industrial Canal, which really isn't too industrial any more. The campground was not as dangerous as this sign might make you think Mike did a grand job backing the camping trailer into our site—only the second tim...

When we left Fontainbleau State Park, we made a stop in the town of Mandeville at the local Ace Hardware store to pick up some spare parts for the camper (they had an RV section because this is RV country in a big way), including a small level so we can make sure the trailer is, well, level. Then we got just a little lost (we missed the road we were looking for), but quickly figured out an alternate route and headed east, back to Mississippi. Our destination was Waveland, Mississippi, about an hour away. We wandered through a detour for all campers and trailers, to avoid a railroad crossing that probably would have scraped the bottom of our trailer right out of existence, but eventually found our way to the beach road. Which was kind of a misnomer, there’s not a lot of beach—the road is right on the edge of the water, there’s no beach most of the way. We found the campground, in Buccaneer State Park, and checked in for five days. All the campsite loops are named for famous pirates ...