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A Relaxing Week in Katy

 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 versions of pigs in a blanket for breakfast one morning, and I had charge of Kassie for a walk with Tina and Bella another day, and we looped around several streets and through a park, all with nice sidewalks to take you from one part to another.

Bella posing for the camera; though she looks
grumpy in this photo, she's really very chill!

Gary told us there’s a lap pool just down the street, and there’s also an elementary school, which has spawned an interesting phenomenon—a long line of cars from the school’s car line all go around the Michel’s little cul de sac instead of turning left out of the school. It can be quite disconcerting when you pull in just at the right (wrong) time and are trying to back into the driveway. They come around fast and furious. Ah, car lines. The thing that gets me is how walkable this area is, but all the kids get picked up and the circle has crazy traffic twice a day.

One evening we were sitting in the family room, generally minding our own business and watching tv, when Gary thought he heard something outside. When he went out to investigate, he found three pink boxes of Crumbl cookie treats and a possum digging in to the biggest box. We had not ordered any cookies, so we thought it might be some kind of secret Santa thing, or a “welcome to the neighborhood,” since they had just moved here a couple of months ago, and it is coming up on Christmas time. None of that explained the possum, of course. Gary brought the boxes in, we determined that the possum had only snacked on the big box, and there were two other boxes with totally over-the-top cookies. Doing due diligence, Gary used the scan code on one of the boxes to find the source of the treats and found the order online. Yep—it was not meant for them, it was actually ordered to be delivered to the next street over (the houses do not look all the same, there is a very pleasing selection of houses of various styles, but the signs in front of the neighborhoods do have a certain sameness; North Lake Village, South Lake Village, and so forth). Gary called the store and they said, “Whoopsie! Well, they are your treats now!” So, even though we rejected the possum-spoiled box, we still had some super sugary treats that evening.

Recreated image of possum on the front porch
eating misdelivered cookies. No one thought
to take a photo of the actual event.

We left Katy on Sunday morning and drove to Victoria, Texas, on our way to Port Aransas on the Gulf Coast. Victoria seems like a nice town, south of San Antonio and north of the coast. It boasts one of the more specific museums I’ve ever seen, the Museum of the Coastal Bend. We did not visit it, but we did restock the camper’s tiny pantry at the H-E-B before heading back to the coast. H-E-B is another thing I remember from editing either Texas history or retail marketing books, I can’t remember which, but there was a feature about Howard Edward Butts, whose mother, Florence Butts, founded the grocery chain. When I went to the Internet to try to recall what else was in the article, I discovered a Wikipedia page that had an invented story about two Mexican immigrants named Hector and Elena Barrera, and the article said the chain got its name from their initials. Most of the information on the page is correct, just the story of the founders and how the grocery chain got its name seems to be fictitious. Weirdness. It’s a perfectly nice grocery store despite the fabricated Wikipedia information. Go figure, you can’t trust the Internet.

We took another ferry (also part of the state highway system and also free) from the town of Aransas Pass, across the Aransas Pass, to Port Aransas, which is on Mustang Island. Not named for the Western Hills High School mascot, but for the wild horses that lived there in the 19th century. There ain’t no wild horses out on Mustang Island any more (very rarified reference to an old song by John Stewart), but there are apparently coyotes, as there are signs warning about them in our campground and, oddly, at the laundromat in town.


Aransas Pass is the ship channel for big ol' boats
heading into the port of Corpus Christi, so the ferry
had to wait for this behemoth to pass first, just like
waiting for barges to go by on the Anderson Ferry

We are staying at On the Beach RV Park, which is, yep—on the beach. It’s actually a dune’s width from the beach, but it only takes about two minutes to walk to the water. We could actually camp on the beach itself, if we had a beach parking permit—there are always a bunch of RVs and a few trucks and tents down there, but it’s the offseason so there’s still plenty of open beach, too. We talked to some people originally from St. Louis (like us, they don’t actually live anywhere at the moment) who were camping on the beach for the night, just to say they’d done it. The gentleman was skeptical about it—he’d made a mark in the sand and when the surf reached it, he was not happy because it was still a couple of hours to high tide. They had told us they’d spent 6 years sailing around the east coast and the Gulf on a sailboat, so I didn’t understand why he was worried about a little tide, but this was their first trip in the RV—a big one—so when we left they were scrambling to move back a bit.


The view at sunset from our campsite at On the Beach

We’re going to stay at On the Beach for awhile, so more about Port Aransas and surrounds still to come . . .

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