Frida Kahlo & A Cold Week on the Coast

Portrait of Frida Kahlo from MFAH exhibit

On the day before we left Katy, Texas, my friend Tina and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to see a special exhibit that had just opened, highlighting the art of Frida Kahlo art and homages to her work and her personal style, I guess you’d call it. Since the 1970s people have been inspired by her artwork to paint similar works, and commercially her image is a big seller on t-shirts, bags, high-top sneakers, and almost everything else you can imagine.

Some odd but interesting paintings by Frida Kahlo at the 
Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibit of her work and life

The commodification of Kahlo at left,
Tina against a wall of Frida impersonators, at right

The exhibit was intriguing, and really big. Gallery after gallery after gallery of her surreal paintings, constructions, and photographs of her, plus the of many artists who admire her. We were there for hours, but also had a little time to see an exhibit of Roman art in the time of Emperor Trajan (late 1st century AD), which included some frescoes from Pompeii. 

A fresco from Pompeii at the Rome in the Time of Trajan exhibit

We went out to dinner that evening, and appropriately had some delicious Mexican food, then watched Indiana win the college football championship, which was nice. Bloomington is close enough to Cincinnati to make it seem like at least a victory for the tristate, I guess. The next morning, we headed south from Katy to Palacios, Texas, a small town on a bay where we had stayed for a day last year. This year we stayed three days, since we were a little early for our reservation in Port Aransas. What I remember most about Palacios was the absolutely beautiful sunsets over the bay, but this year it was gray and rainy, just a few pink and orange clouds at the horizon. Still, it’s a nice place, and we enjoyed some Vietnamese food and took a walk along the waterfront when it wasn’t raining.

A stormy Palacios sunset

Near the place where we started our walk, there were a lot of pastel colored buildings, quite large, with individual rooms. Turns out it is the Texas Baptist Encampment—very similar to the Methodist Camp Meeting in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard that we visited last year, but the brightly colored buildings are big instead of very small like the ones in Oak Bluffs. But they seem to do the same sort of thing, have educational lectures, like a Chautauqua society. They are having a series of lectures about historical preservation. And as a matter of fact, Palacios is in the midst of preserving a grand old hotel overlooking the bay. There’s a Smithsonian sign in the yard of the Luther Hotel, and it seems like they had a kind of display on the construction fence around the building. The Southern Pacific Railroad came through town in the early part of the twentieth century, bringing both Midwesterners who came to settle in Texas and visitors who were looking for a warm and pretty place to vacation.

One of the colorful buildings of the Texas Baptist Encampment

On our way from Palacios to Port Aransas, we went through an area called the Danevang on State Route 71. The name means “Danish fields,” it is considered the Danish capital of Texas, and it’s still very Danish, thanks to the Danish Folksemfund, the Danish Folk Heritage Society. Danish immigrants from the Midwest settled in the town, determined to keep their Danish culture alive. A school founded in 1894 taught students in Danish until 1974. They don’t strictly speak Danish any more, but they still keep the culture alive.

Danevang, the Danish capital of Texas

 We left for Port Aransas on Friday morning, January 23, with alarming weather forecasts talking about a huge winter storm that was going to bring snow and ice and record low temperatures from Texas to New England. Oh joy. It was only supposed to get down to about 29 or 30 overnight for a couple of nights in Port Aransas, but that’s pretty cold when you are camping. So we contemplated getting a hotel room in Corpus Christi, which is only about 30 minutes away, to avoid the worst of the cold. And maybe ice. Cincinnati, we heard, was going to get at least a foot of snow from Sunday to Monday. Lots of ice predicted up Dallas way, but we are hoping the icy precipitation will be minimal down here.

We have come up with a way to store our foam mattress topper in the camper’s bathroom when we are not sleeping. Obviously that makes it difficult to use the bathroom, but honestly, we do not use it that much, especially not during the day when there’s a perfectly good bathroom just thirty yards or so away. And the foam covers all the cracks in the foam cushions that make up the seating at the table, which makes for a much more comfortable night’s sleep. I still think it was a good idea to get the foam in the seat cushions replaced with denser foam—they will last longer—but they just weren’t terribly comfortable by themselves. Now the whole setup is working well.

We did decide to go to a motel on the outskirts of Corpus Christi, and we’re glad we did. The temperatures have been cold during the day and frigid overnight, with high winds making it even colder. It’s not as bad here as places that got ice and snow, but it’s too cold to have running water and just too cold to camp. We are in Portland, Texas, home of many huge chemical plants. We’ve watched football, eaten sushi, and just generally lazed about for a couple of days, but we’re going back to face the (slightly) warmer temperatures on Tuesday. We’re still in for a chilly week, but we’re hoping to see warmer temperatures by the weekend.