South Padre Island

 Aggh.. it has been a long time since I posted anything, yet again. Sorry!

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I started work at an aerospace company in 1985, right before I graduated from USC (Master of Liberal Arts) and worked there for nearly 10 years, until the programming department was outsourced. I worked for the company that got the outsource contract for another 27 years, supporting the same customer. I finally had the chance to become 'A Real Girl' when the customer decided to employ me directly! I switched jobs on my birthday this last year and one of the things that came with the job was 50 hours of vacation. Now at this company you have to use your vacation before the end of the year - if you have time left at the end of the year, you can only save up to 40 hours and those have to be used by March of the next year. So what to do with my 50 hours?

We decided to investigate the southwest part of Texas (we have explored the northeast, the southeast and central so far). Plane flight to Austin the day after Thanksgiving and then we started our exploring. One of the things that was highest on our list was visiting Starbase in the very tippy bottom of the state.  We made it down there just before sunset and decided we liked the area a lot. 

One of the Starships

Sunset at Starbase

South Padre Island is near  to Starbase as the crow flies, but to get to it from Starbase means a 35 mile journey. We were looking for someplace to spend the night and decided we wanted to be near the water. We found a hotel with beach access and headed there.

View from our room on the fourth floor - you can just make out the water. The guy at the front desk said they USED to have full beach view, until the building in the back was put up.

Walkway to the beach

 Port Isabel Lighthouse

 From Port Isabel, you take the Queen Isabella Bridge. You can just make out Starbase (it was foggy a lot!)

We liked it so much that we spent most of the rest of our vacation days on South Padre, though we did take jaunts out to the surrounding area. It was fairly hot compared to the beach! We liked Los Fresnos and Harlingen. We explored Brownsville and Edinburg, but they are a bit noisy!

There was an amusement area. Tucked into a corner was this amazing sandcastle display.

I spent some time sewing up the Winding Ways blocks from my Go bag. I actually finished all 9 of the blocks and sewed them into a top. (It's going to be a table mat)

We went down to the beach every day, sometimes more than once a day.

View of the Gulf of Mexico.

Collected lots of sea shells.

I can identify most of them - there are several cockle shells, several oysters (the outsides of several look like they are rocks, but turn them over and you see they are really oysters), a partial mussel shell, a partial whelk shell, a baby's ear, a blue-edged scallop, a sundial, a clam shell, a lettered olive, a bonnet shell - could be a white scotch bonnet which the identification pages say is pretty rare, and a half-naked pen shell. 

There is a wee orangish cockle shell on the bottom right that has a hole - evidently Moon snails like to latch onto other mollusks and liquify the owner for their dinner.  

My favorite is the lettered olive - it has such an interesting surface - very polished and smooth. The pen shell is the most delicate - it traveled home inside the large oyster shell at the top. 

I need to find a way to display them. Probably need to get a shadow box.

And we made it back to Starbase before we left. Amazingly we got there just as the road was closing for the movement of the launch vehicle - the rocket part that will lift the Starship into space, back to its hanger. The guard was so excited!  We pulled over on a side road and got out just as it was passing by. It's HUGE!

Video of the launch vehicle being moved - not sure if this will work in the published version of this post - I can't get it to run in the preview. We shall see!

We went back up to Austin the day before our flight home so we would be 'in the area' and not have to rush to the airport. (We learned that lesson when we went to central Texas a few years ago..it was quite the wild ride and we were so frazzled when we got on the plane) We took a drive north of Austin to see more of the Hill Country. Since it was Fall, there were lots of gorgeous trees.

We want to go back to South Padre!