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 maintained by the town; we drove from the top of the island down to our campground along the beach, which is fun.

The pass at Port Aransas; pink circle indicates the dolphin

It’s still been cold the last few days; on a cool and rainy day last week, I drove to Rockport, about a half-hour away, to go to a quilt show. It was great; I met some other quilters from the area and agreed to make some quilt blocks for a project that was making quilts for people who were affected by the flooding in the Texas Hill Country last year. I also saw a lot of lovely quilts. I will restrain myself and just post a couple of photos that I took. The quilt show was held at a church, and in the sanctuary, the pews exhibited a lot of antique quilts. It was disconcerting to discover that there were antique quilts from the 1970s. Some where much older, even from the 19th century, but I was particularly amazed at the quilt (on the left below) which was made of thousands of half-inch squares. My patience would have run out when I made about two rows of that sort of thing. But it’s an amazing quilt.

 

  A quilt made of a zillion tiny squares         A convergence quilt similar to one I made

The quilt on the right is called a convergence quilt, and to explain it briefly, you sew four big squares together and then cut those into strips and rearrange them to get this pattern. I noticed this quilt because I’ve made one convergence quilt, and used very similar fabrics to this quilt, so it looked a lot like the one I made.

The quilt show was on Friday; on Saturday, it was sunny but quite cold, so we decided to drive to Corpus Christi and visit the Art Museum of South Texas, on the bay there. It’s in a very modern building designed by Philip Johnson, and it apparently has changing exhibits, like the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, rather than a permanent collection. The main exhibit was landscapes, and I like landscapes. We viewed several galleries of paintings, from the early 1800s up through modern works. I especially liked one that was a landscape with quilts.

              
           The South Texas Art Museum                               Landscape with Quilts

Upstairs at the museum there were other smaller exhibits, including some pottery pieces made by an artist with a good sense of humor—weird little guys and animals decorating bowls and lamps and other things—as well as an exhibit by the arts faculty at nearby University of Texas Corpus Christi. This installation below was knitted. Every which way, and all over one wall. It was interestingly weird. I also liked the museum’s small collection of sculptures of animals and a gallery that featured one woman’s collection of Spanish Colonial and Pre-Columbian artwork.

Knitted artwork that is weird but interesting           Pre-Columbian death’s head jug

We had lunch at the restaurant in the museum, which featured Middle Eastern food, so I can’t remember the name of what I had, but it was poached eggs in a tomatoey sauce and was delicious. Mike had a cheesey eggy flatbread concoction. The view from the restaurant was across the aquamarine waters of Corpus Christi Bay and was quite lovely. We also had a view of the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier that is now apparently a museum.

Blue skies, aquamarine waters, and the USS Lexington

Ocean Drive Boulevard in Corpus Christi is a street of alternating mansions and shacks, which is intriguing. We passed the mural of local girl Farrah Fawcett, and Mirador de la Flor, a shrine to the Tejana singer Selena, both of which are in downtown Corpus Christi. Then we headed back down across the bridge to Padre Island and up to our campsite on Mustang Island.

It gets darn cold at night, but not so cold we can’t handle it in the camper with our little electric heater and our homemade thermal window covers that make it look like we’re inside a spaceship—Spaceship Shrimpi.

Spaceship Shrimpi on a cold winter night

But it’s warming up now. And the sun is shining, which makes it even warmer. We’re just hoping the sunshine and higher temperatures stay around for the rest of February. There are Mardi Gras parades and a light-up kite festival coming in the next few weeks. Plus there’s aways the beach!