Leaving Padre Island

Today (Sunday) we'll be leaving the beach for awhile, but it has gotten cooler and the wind's still blowing so it won't be quite so hard to go—besides, we'll be back in a couple of weeks for another month at the beach on Mustang Island.

When we leave here today we'll drive about 70 miles north to Magnolia Beach where our friends Ron and Nancy have a beach house with a place to park the coach while we make a trip to Fort Smith in the Explorer. Since Roger's brother Rick will be in the Phillipines for a couple of weeks, we needed to be close in case his mom has problems. She's doing quite well in assisted living but it seems wise to have someone in town—just in case there should be a problem.

Roger got his kite out and flew it for awhile one day this week—I could never get him AND the kite in the same frame, but here's a picture of each:


Barb and Fred from Indiana, new friends that we met at Enchanted Oaks, moved out here Wednesday and we've really enjoyed hanging out with them. Here they are at the end of the walkway overlooking Malaquite Beach:

One day out on Mustang Island, a blowfish had ended up on the beach—probably the most interesting thing we've seen on the beach all year. It was dead and I really wanted to take it, but it was still “squishy” so I left it where it was. I've learned that “squishy” things found on the beach don't usually dry out naturally and end up a stinky mess! Our camera was in the car, so Fred gets the credit for this great shot:

Thursday we all went into Corpus Christi for some shopping and lunch at Catfish Charlies--a great place for catfish, gumbo and chicken-fried steak. Yesterday we took a drive down Padre Island but were only able to make it about 8 or 9 miles—about half as far as we'd made it the last couple of trips. It's been SO dry here that the sand keeps getting softer and deeper with no rain to pack the sand and/or smooth the ruts. That's Fred on the dune and Barb getting into the car in the first pic. The other shows how deep some of the holes in the beach were.


I probably won't be updating the blog for a couple of weeks, but we get back to the beach on March 15, so I'll try to post again soon after that.....in the meantime, here's a place familiar to some of our special friends (they know who they are!) and this is posted just for them.