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Christmas on the Beach

 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 a head wind when I was riding back today, however.

We went to the IGA in Port Aransas when we first got here, and I discovered the truth of a comment I had read in a newspaper at the laundromat when we were giving our sleeping bags a good washing. The comment was that “everything costs more on this side of the ferry,” and they weren’t kidding. So last Saturday we made a trip across the ferry to Aransas Pass on the mainland and stocked up a bit at the H-E-B there. We can only stock up to a small degree, as we have a very miniscule refrigerator, but it was still worth the trip (though the store was as crazy as you’d expect any store to be four days before Christmas).

Sunrise on the beach on Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve dawned sunny and warm, and we spent a couple of hours on the beach, which was more crowded than we had seen it. Apparently beach holiday celebrations are fairly common. There were lots of kites, and something I’m calling “land kites,” big nylon critters that are tethered to the ground and just bounce around in the wind. The surf is rough, so I didn’t really go swimming, but I did go in the water and got mostly wet. Mike went in up to his knees, and had a good long beach walk, too.

A posse of "land kites"

An interesting event later on Christmas Eve—a service at the Episcopalian church down the road, Trinity by the Sea, was introduced by the trumpet-playing priest. After a false start, he did a pretty great job with “Joy to the World,” and then I re-learned that Episcopalian services are just masses with different names for all the parts. I was amused by the eclectic approach to dressing for Christmas Eve mass—a girl in front of me was wearing a bathing suit with a long t-shirt over it, and I saw one man whose Hawaiian shirt had a Christmas tree motif. Another lady thought a red lace dress and 5” heels was the way to go, but my favorite was sitting just a few spots down the pew. She wanted to be mistaken for Kate Middleton, I’m fairly certain. She was wearing a plaid wool skirt and knee high suede boots (it was about 72 degrees at that time) and her hair was perfect!


The Christmas lights and decorations
in Port Aransas are all ocean themed

I had decided to make a trifle for the Christmas potluck, which as a friend once said about salads, isn’t cooking, it’s just assembly. I had pound cake and pudding mix and strawberries and whipped cream, and I assembled my layers in a big, heavy pressed glass trifle bowl I had found at the thrift shop operated by the Episcopalian church. It was an impressive thing—the bowl and the assembled trifle. So we walked over to the communal patio and added it to the groaning board. There was turkey and ham, many side dishes including potato salad spiced up with jalapenos, several salsa-y offerings, green bean casserole (of course), various versions of macaroni and cheese, and lots of desserts.

We ate with a couple who were originally from Georgia but are full-time RVers now, and have some way of having a Texas mailing address. They had some good stories, including working at a campground near the Badlands in South Dakota during Sturgis week. They were far enough away from Sturgis that they knew it was going on, and they were full, but it wasn’t as crazy as Sturgis proper. They also told us that Atlanta and the surrounding area has been ruined by having it turned into Hollywood south. They didn’t appreciate what the movie industry had done there, especially in small towns south of Atlanta that had been pretty much turned into company towns for various studios. I didn’t know that at all.

A lot of the people here are work campers, and we’ve met a few others at previous campgrounds, including Dan who made the great potstickers back on the Bolivar Peninsula. I think a lot of these places are owned by a company far away, but are pretty much run by some of the people who live/camp there. And they do a good job, the Christmas potluck was quite nice and they seem to have something going on almost every day.

The path down to the beach from the campground

After we ate way too much, we had another walk on the beach to use up some of the calories we’d taken on, and if anything the beach was busier on Christmas afternoon than it had been on Christmas Eve. Then we decided to have one more beach walk after it got dark, and except for the campers down south of us, the beach was pretty much deserted. But there were lots of stars above us! A good way to end a nice Christmas on the beach.



Comments

  1. AmyFebruary 1, 2025 at 7:33 AM

    Apparently I can write a comment if I'm on a computer, but it won't let me do it if I'm on my phone. Hmm. I'm caught up through December now. Delightful reads, all of them. I have to get to the point where I come home and read an entry once a week. It's just that I come home these days and don't want to see a computer until the next day. LOL. Christmas sounds like it was delightful though and I'm glad. I hope your adventure back this way is delightfully peaceful!

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