Island Life

Texas has a series of barrier islands along the coast.  We stayed for two nights at Padre Island National Seashore.  It’s a largely untouched 70 mile long park.  The bad part of this stay was red tide.  Red tide is a high concentration (or bloom) of a certain microscopic alga in the water.  This causes a lot of dead fish on the shoreline (see the picture) along with an aerosol in the air that causes irritation.  This meant a lot of coughing and congestion.  Early on, it wasn’t bad enough to leave but it made it difficult to do more than walk along the beach for a little bit before the irritation was too much.  Two days of exposure was too much.  The second night we were coughing all night.  It doesn’t seem to be long lasting since our symptoms disappeared over the next 24 hours. 

The good part was camping near the beach and going to sleep listening to the waves.  It was very windy most of the time, which makes it good for windsurfing and sailing.  Stars were also very bright since there is no electricity at the campground and it’s fairly far from the nearest town (Corpus Christi).  We’d love to come back sometime when the red tide is gone.

The campground had some exceptionally friendly people.  We met part-timers, full-timers, and from all over the U.S. and Canada.   Some camped in tents, vans, small RV’s, and large RV’s.   We found some ‘normal’ full-timers.  Normal is defined as people like us.  Perhaps that’s not a valid definition?

It seems that many full-timers end up traveling for years before they buy a home again.  There is also a sub-set of full-timers that live almost exclusively in Walmart parking lots. Full-timing is a popular lifestyle with more variation than I expected.

One of the weird things we found on the beach was a special type of coral (yellow wire coral?) that looks like wire. It has a yellow outside and an internal portion that looks like wire. Personally, I thought the ranger was crazy when he told me this was coral, but we saw a lot of it on the beach mixed with seaweed. 

Our next stop was an overnighter at a state park south of Houston.  The drought has really affected this park.  Docks on the lake were 10-30’ from the water.  Some sections of the lake were completely dry.  However it was still a good stay and we got to watch an armadillo at our site.  He even liked the water that was dripping at our faucet.