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Leaving Port Aransas

 We left On the Beach RV Park the morning of January 31. We had stayed there more than six weeks, and we promised the friends we made that we’d come back sometime. We really will try to return because it was a very nice place to live for six weeks. I’ll miss the craft mornings and coffee & donuts and bingo, and the chair yoga not quite as much, though I know it was good for me.

On one of the craft mornings, I led a “class” in quilt making, though we really only made very small quilts that could serve as a coaster for a cup of coffee. I figured we’d have to sew everything by hand, but one of the people who came had a sewing machine in her RV and volunteered to go get it, so we were actually able to finish the tiny quilts in two hours. I think everyone enjoyed it; they were planning another quilting session to try to make squares for a bigger quilt. The reason I thought of this was that the place we stayed the first night after we left Port Aransas was Serendipity RV Park in Palacios, Texas, and they had a community room that had sewing machines you could use!! We only stayed there one night, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of it, but I thought it was pretty cool. They also had a pool table and a paperback library—every place we’ve stayed has had a paperback “take one/leave one” library, so I have been picking up interesting-looking books and leaving behind the Robert Heinlein novels I brought with me.

Back on the road: we took the ferry once more to the mainland and then headed down Texas Route 35 along the coast, across several bays, and finally arrived in the small town of Palacios, Texas, on Matagorda Bay. There are a lot of waterfront parks in Palacios--as in many Texas coast towns--which is nice, but the reason there are so many parks is that they were put in places that were wiped out in hurricanes, which is not so great.


The view from the city park in Palacios

Palacios is a lovely town. We had only been at the Serendipity RV Park a short time when one of the longer-term residents invited us to happy hour. We wandered over and met nice folks from Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Australia. We’d skipped lunch, so we didn’t stay too long before we went to get some dinner at a seafood restaurant in town. We followed another couple in and then out on to the patio, and we weren’t there long before the man at the other table got up and introduced himself as Tuc (Took?) and asked where we were from and what brought us there. We wound up having a long conversation with him and his girlfriend and the owner of the restaurant, all second-generation Vietnamese. The owner told us all the shrimp we were eating were fresh caught from the bay; the large shrimp fleet is docked at the port next to the RV park where we are staying. Then we also got invited to a Vietnamese Lunar New Year festival, with a promise of delicious food AND dragon dancing. It was a delicious dinner and a delightful conversation


View from the patio at Danny's Seafood Restaurant

Back at the RV park, there was a gorgeous sunset over the shrimp fleet port, and we met a lady walking her dog who invited us to the dime bingo this evening. The fun never stops! The next morning we packed up and headed out, but unfortunately, when we went to find the New Year festival at the Vietnamese church, it was so crowded there was nowhere we could possibly park with our van and trailer, so we missed out on that.


The sunset at Serendipity RV Park

On to the Bolivar Peninsula

The next leg of our trip was down along the Texas coast to Galveston Island, where we took another ferry back across to the Bolivar Peninsula. But first we had to wait for not one, not two, but THREE humongous cruise ships to pass through the ship channel before the ferry could start across. One of them had a roller coaster on the top deck. But we finally made it across the channel and down the peninsula to stay at the same place we stayed on the trip down, the Palapas RV Park. It's right across the street from the beach, so we had a nice long walk along the water in the morning, and I found a weird but interesting partial fish skeleton. I liked it enough to photograph it, but not to keep it.

A weird fish skeleton that looks like a goat skull

We cleverly arrived on Saturday and stayed two days so we’d be there for the weekly potluck dinner on Sunday evening. The difference in this stay was that it was warm and sunny; it had been gray and cool on our way down. However, the folks there told us that during the big snowstorm across the south, they got three inches of snow and went sledding on the beach. I was glad to be there in warmer weather myself, and we saw another lovely sunset from the top deck of the building there, where I also got a cool overhead shot of our camper.

Bird's eye view of our campsite at Palapas

A Detour in Southern Louisiana

We crossed over into Louisiana on Monday morning, determined to avoid interstates, especially the dreaded I-10 where we were stuck in traffic for a long time on our trip down to the Texas coast in December. We headed way down in a fairly desolate area, only a few small towns, fog rolling in from the Gulf, when we finally made it to the little ferry that would take us across open water to more of the swampy bayou land of Louisiana. Well, the lady directing traffic to the ferry just shook her head when she saw us. The incline from the ferry landing to the boat would have ripped out the underside of the camping trailer, so we had a 50-mile detour and still wound up on I-10 around Lake Charles. We got off the highway as soon as we could and headed south again, stopping in Abbeville, Louisiana, where we could not find an RV place that suited us. So we drove about 15 miles south of town to the Palmetto Island State Park. It was just what we were looking for, quiet and green, secluded and not too crowded. You can see what it was called Palmetto State Park in the photo below, but I am not sure why it was Palmetto Island—we didn’t cross any major water to get there. I think maybe it is an island of solid ground in the maze of bayous and swamps around it.


The palmettos that give the state park its name
are everywhere; it is a palmetto forest!

We were welcomed to the park by a giant alligator statue, and there were also warnings about black bears in the area. I figured there was a good chance that those woods and bayous were home to a few loup-garou as well, but the night passed without incident. We heard nothing but crickets, which was cool for early February. In fact, it was warm and muggy, but a good warm and muggy, you know? Also, I found a Louis L’Amour and an Elmore Leonard novel in their laundry lending library, and exchanged them for a book I’d finished, so I was pleased with that swap. Louisiana’s state parks are lovely, and I really hope to go back to Palmetto Island sometime and stay awhile to see if there really are gators and werewolves and bears, oh my!

This nice alligator welcomed us to Palmetto Island State Park

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