Beach Ramblings

As many of you know, I'm really a beach lover and have been fortunate to have sampled the beaches of many places in the world. Roger loves the mountains, but I'm happiest anywhere there's a beach to walk on and surf to look at and listen to and various birds to watch! The beaches here on the Gulf Coast of Texas are no exception. Mustang and Padre Islands don't compare to the white sand of the Florida Panhandle and the water doesn't even come close to the beauty of the clear blue of the Caribbean--but...HEY!...it's a beach and the sand is soft and fine and doesn't cling to your skin.
So even if it's isn't snow-white and although it sometimes has too much seaweed, it's a place that makes me happy and gives me peace!
One of my favorite pastimes is looking for seashells. This winter has been a disappointment in that respect, but since I really have no NEED for more shells, it may have been a blessing in disguise--less to carry and try to figure out what to do with them. The first two weeks we were here at Gulf Waters, walking the beach almost every day, my "finds" were practically non-existent as this shows the total of what I found...and, yes, that's a plastic pig--when there are no shells, you have to take what you can find! lol
I did have ONE day last week that produced enough to satisfy my appetite for finding "treasures", but I'm still looking for that elusive Sand Dollar. There are hundreds of broken pieces, but not a single one wholly intact. As you can see from this picture, it doesn't take a lot to make me happy:
Roger rode his KLR several miles down Padre Island on Friday and said the beach was packed enough that (if we got an early start) we might be able to get farther down the island than we'd been able to go all year.
WRONG! We got to the National Seashore before 9 a.m. (it's almost an hour from here), high tide wasn't going to be until after 2 p.m., but the beach had changed so much from the day before that we STILL only made it about 19 miles before the sand got too soft to go any farther. Two years ago we had made the 63-mile trip to the cut between Padre Island and South Padre several times. BUT that winter there had been tremendous rains and high winds, unlike the dry winter this year--apparently the rain had packed the sand, uncovered the seashells, and made the beach road much more driveable with more shells available. Lesson learned: April showers bring May flowers and January torrential rains bring seashells and hard packed beach roads.

I've added a link to an album of "Birds of the Texas Coast" we've seen--and gotten photos of--in my list on the right of this screen, but here's a flock of Rose Spoonbills (??) that I just had to post here:
There have been some spectacular sunsets lately so last evening we walked out to the beach walkway and got this shot of the sun going down over Corpus Christi...if you look hard, you can see the downtown buildings on the horizon.
We'll be here another week and will then be heading back to "The Rock". Temps there are supposed to get into the 20's tonight, though, and it MIGHT get down to 60 in the morning here, so I'm glad we're still here this week.