Skip to main content

Good Day, Sunshine!

 

Winter’s over in South Texas, I’m happy to say. The air temperatures are back in the 70s during the day, and the semitropical sun makes it plenty warm enough for shorts and t-shirts. When the sun goes down, it does get cool quickly, but still only into the 60s. We can live with that.

On Tuesdays there is Bingo up at the community tent at On the Beach RV Park. Occasionally I attend; the admission is a $5 lottery ticket, and the tickets serve as the prizes for folks who win Bingo games. That is never me. If there were a prize for the Bingo card with the most spaces still uncovered after someone shouts “Bingo!”, I would win that every time. They do jazz it up with side bets, but you actually have to get a Bingo to win those, too. Along with my lack of luck, when I do go up to a Bingo night, I recall just how numbingly boring Bingo is. I could bring a book and still keep track of the numbers called (since so few of them are on my card). All to say that they do a lot of fun things at the campground. Bingo night is not one of them.


The Community Tent at our campground

Yoga and Tai Chi exercising (neither thing is actually Yoga or Tai Chi) with a YouTube program on the TV in the tent is not exactly fun, either, but it seems like a good thing to do some mornings. I don’t believe the “exercises based on the philosophy of Tai Chi” instructor has ever actually seen Tai Chi done properly, and I just stop when it gets too rambunctious. Tai Chi is not meant to be rambunctious. But the company is good, and it’s probably good for me, too.

There’s also potluck dinners, pancake breakfasts, poker runs, cornhole contests, and coming soon, a Mardi Gras parade with golf carts. I am kind of looking forward to that, catching a few beads and watching the silliness. I’ve learned that Mardi Gras isn’t just for New Orleans; they celebrate it everywhere down here. There’s a proper parade (not just golf carts) across the water in Aransas Pass that I’m looking forward to as well, it’s the Saltwater Mardi Gras.

There are times when the community tent is not hosting some sort of event, and then it’s a nice sunny space with tables where I can set up my small traveling sewing machine. When I’m sewing, someone invariably comes in to ask me if I’ll sew something for them. I mended the seams and patched holes in a bag they use to store panels of the tent, fixed a zipper on one of the couch cushions in the tent, and I made a couple of round tablecloths for some cocktail tables one of the staff found (they were being thrown out) sometime soon.

 
My sewing stuff set up in the tent, and a couple of quilt squares I made

A lot of what they call RV “resorts” have clubhouses, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I’ve enjoyed a couple, but I think the tent is somehow more down-to-earth. I have heard that there was once a small clubhouse building here, but Hurricane Harvey made short work of that in 2017. Most of the buildings on the Gulf side of the island are places that have been built since 2017, because Harvey wiped out a lot of what was near the water.

We didn't do a whole lot this week, just enjoyed the warmer weather at the beach and in the campground, but we did go to the bird sanctuary the other day. In addition to a very well fed pelican, we saw a lot of ducks, willets, and of course seagulls. It is amusing how they stick with their own kind—“Birds of a feather flock together” is not an empty idiom.

  
A pelican who is pleased with himself and flocks of ducks, willets, and seagulls

After the bird sanctuary, we had dinner at a seafood and pizza place—the pizza did not have seafood on it, but it was delicious—and then we went back to the harbor to walk off some of those carbohydrates we’d enjoyed. Harry the Heron was not in evidence, but it was a beautiful sunset, and Mike noted that a lovely sunset with a construction crane in it was a good way to sum up Texas. Sort of, “Yep, it’s beautiful down here, but we’re also gonna make a buck.”


Note the crane behind the palm trees; the Texas coast
is sort of like a mullet haircut--neat in front, but a
little ragged and working hard behind the scenes

As I mentioned, we just did not do a lot this week. There were a couple of trips back and forth on the ferry to Aransas Pass for supplies at the H-E-B market and we also visited Twisted Coastal RV, looking for some plastic leveler blocks to stabilize the camper. They had some old ones they wanted to get rid of and just gave them to us. It was a kind of crazy place, but the people running it were charming and told us about a lot of festivals we couldn’t miss. Of course, we’ll miss some of them, but not the Kite Festival coming up this weekend. There are always kites flying on the beach, but for the festival there will be kites flying along about two miles of beach. Should be quite a show.

Comments

  1. Diane L.February 21, 2026 at 4:31 PM

    I remember the kites you made! Too bad you don't have one with one!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Barb D.March 2, 2026 at 12:53 PM

    I still have my Strawberry box kite you made me years ago

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JulieMarch 5, 2026 at 8:00 PM

      I really thought I had brought a small penguin kite I made, but I couldn't find it in the melee in the van. But it was cool to have my dad's travel kite. Most of the kites I made have kind of rotted away, but I have a few of them--in storage somewhere!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waterways and Wetlands of Western Ohio

  Though we are still not technically on the road for awhile, it’s spring in the Midwest and we are occasionally getting out to see some sites nearby. Last week we had a sunny, warm day that followed many days of rain, so we decided to head out somewhere to hike where there were boardwalks—or at least solid rock paths. We started at Charleston Falls, near Tipp City. The preserve was far more crowded than usual; the warm weather after a long winter apparently brought out the crowds, especially homeschooled kids and their families. We took the path less traveled back through prairie meadows (only slightly mushy) to the top of the falls, then wandered down the stone paths to the bottom of the falls. There was water going over the falls, though not a lot. The falls are fed by small underground springs several miles to the east, and the stream creating the falls plummets almost 40' as it flows to the Great Miami River, one mile to the west.  Charleston Falls Preserve in western O...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Platte River Road . . . and Big Rocks

The North Platte River runs the entire length of Nebraska, almost right through the center of the state. It’s a braided stream, a river or stream with many intertwined channels separated by islands or sandbars, so it looks somewhat like the strands of a braid. The folks heading west followed the main channel of the river, where there was grass for the oxen and mules, water for everyone, and fairly flat going. The government built Fort Kearny along the North Platte fairly early—1848, my guidebook tells me—to help protect the travelers along the Oregon and California Trails. Fun fact, both of those were the same trail until far western Wyoming, and they were on the south side of the river. When the Mormons started heading west to Salt Lake City, they walked with handcarts along a trail on the north side of the river, a route that was called the Mormon Trail, and met up with the other two trails around what’s now the border of Nebraska and Wyoming. North Platte River in Nebraska The tow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living with the Chill, Waiting for the Warm Up

 The Coastal Bend area of the Texas Coast is known as a birder’s paradise, and we have seen some pretty cool specimens, up close, including roseate spoonbills and brown pelicans and willets. This heron believes that he owns the wharf down at the harbor park in Port Aransas. He clearly is accustomed to posing for photos. Harry the Heron surveys his domain There’s also a tower to climb at the harbor park, giving you a good view of the waterway called Aransas Pass, where the ferry crosses to the mainland, and some of the huge ships that go through the pass. We often see dolphins in the water up there, but they are very tricky to photograph. The circle on the photo below shows a dolphin fin just popping up out of the water. This one stayed for quite awhile until we left to get a seafood dinner at Grumbles on the other side of the harbor. After dinner we drove around to the University of Texas maritime research facility and then past that, to the beach road which is amazingly well maint...
1 comment
Read more