December, 2018

 Well, that wasn’t taken this  December, although it does look wintery! July, 2018, in front of the Columbia Glacier, near Valdez, Alaska!

South Padre Island- super built up tourist beach town- looks a lot like coastal Florida! We spent enough time to assess whether or not it might be a good winter destination- it is warmer than North Padre Island, windy a lot, and not much to do- lots of bars and restaurants.

 

But they have Christmas sand castle sculptures:

 

 

Lake Corpus Christi State Park- halfway between the dealer where we bought the truck and the cap dealer north of here. Here is our NEW truck, at Bird Island Basin, Padre Island National Seashore:

Why did we buy a new truck? Well, let me explain- the old truck, which we loved and it served us well, had dual real wheels and a crew cab which meant it was longer and wider than we now need. Plus we put a lot of hard miles on it in Alaska. The new truck is 16″ shorter because it is an extended cab, only a F250, single real wheels which is about two feet narrower. So, now we actually fit in a normal parking space (without the camper on :-).
Padre Island National Seashore- we’ve returned with hopes of better weather than last winter and so far we have had a week of sunny and 70 degrees, however it does look like things will be degrading.

The gov’t shutdown threw us a bit of a twist. They closed the campground we were in and kicked us all out on Saturday morning, including locking the bathhouse (which we didn’t need, but others did) and the dump station, which we did need. Fortunately, they left a smaller, bayside campground open because it has NO facilities. About 20 rigs moved over to Bird Island Basin Campground and surprised the handful of quiet windsurfer RVers! The one up side is that there are no park staff around to collect fees so they said we could all stay for free- which only saves us $7/night, but we’ll take it for the inconvenience of hauling the camper up to a county campground to use their dump station.

Christmas was quiet- good food and sunshine. The campers here gathered around a “Charlie Brown Christmas Tree” for conversation and mosquitoes- we didn’t stay long 🙂