Good evening, Campers! It’s Silver Cliche’ checking in with you for one more (and probably final) time from Matagorda Bay Nature Center on the Lower Colorado River (of Texas).
The day started early for me today, but it often does. From somewhere around 5:00, Zachary sleeps with his eyes open. His objective is to catch me in any motion or noise that indicates I’m stirring. I’ve been a 6 hour-a-night guy my entire adult life. 5:00 usually signals a time when my body has had enough. That’s nearly assured if crazy dreams or the thoughts of how to manage life on the road and our responsibilities back home invade my brain. Today Zack saw his opening and he pounced. A wagging tail in the face and a lick to an exposed ankle was all it took. We were up.
After coffee, a crossword, a scan of the news and more coffee, the sun was coming up. So I grabbed my phone and camera, harnessed Zack and set out for Red Drum Point. There, two vans and two cars well spaced out in the huge parking lot near the jetty. Thinking of the film “Nomadland”, which won best picture last night, I captured this pic of the real thing.
Zack bravely walked about a half mile out the boardwalk with me. It actually goes over the current surf line to get to a short bridge to the stone jetty. The surf was rough enough at dawn that the bridge was wet and being sprayed by each breaker that crashed beneath us. That seemed far enough.
I posted my first new pics to Flickr (the Yahoo! picture sharing site) today after a four year break. Both were from the boardwalk. The full, hi-res versions are there at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/131457232@N02/ but I’ll share the low-res images here.
Today was laundry day. It’s looking like we are going to press on west tomorrow. It was time to take advantage of full hookups and wash clothes and linens. Mrs. C’ was a bit bemused by my laundry routine. There is a lot of operator involvement in the portable laundry biz. It’s like the difference between driving a stick shift in comparison to the automatic washers we all have at home. In some warped, sick way I like that. Here’s a pic of my nemesis in its operating position in the shower enclosure of the Airstream.
That’s the wash tub on the left and the spin dryer on the right. The tub is filled manually from the shower wand (will that be cold, warm or hot?). Rinse is manual, too, The dryer holds half a washer load and spins the living crap out of it. Nature finishes the job.
So after I amused myself in a laundry way for an hour and a half we sat in the screen room watching the gulls feed in the river. A trawler that I had seen working offshore came up the river. Over 80% of the catch offloaded here is gulf shrimp. Note the freeloading pelicans on the boom lines. We also saw a dolphin in the water.
We decided to venture out. Having explored the crossroads of Matagorda yesterday, we headed to the county seat of Matagorda County today. That’s the gleaming metropolis of Bay City - population 17,000, which is about half of the entire county. We drove through the town, took in both sides of the tracks and did some Google searching for topics of interest. We learned that Bay City is essentially closed on Monday. So we did some grocery shopping at the H-E-B (say the name of each letter... don’t try to pronounce it the way morons from Florida do. Huh! Those know-nothings.). Every part of the country has its own regional tastes and grocery stores offer regional products to satisfy those tastes. Here it’s Mexican-influenced. I though I understood that until I encountered this:
I would have bought one out of curiosity but at the size of a bowling ball I didn’t have room to store it anywhere in our tiny home on wheels. Plus, any food that appears to weigh 6 pounds and only cost $1.19 scares me.
Back to Matagorda, dinner “at home” and a little chillin’. I wanted to drive on the beach (under Texas law evidently beaches are public thoroughfares). I took the dogs, jumped in the Tundra and headed off. Mrs. C’ declined. I think she believed it was a “boy thing”... you know... like downshifting a washing machine. I got to the sand, put the truck in 4WD high... reconsidered... went to 4 wheel low and crawled across the sand. About 100 feet into a strip of dry, powdery, freshly wind blown sand above the surf line I started to sink. No, I had not brought the compressor or let the air out of the tires. This was a short beach trip with the dogs. I stopped, put it in reverse, and slowly backed onto the slightly damp, coarser sand that had been my dear friend 30 seconds earlier. I went on a different route that led to the jetty forming one side of the channel entrance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Lower Colorado River. The dogs loved jumping block-to-block on these massive pink granite blocks. Each one is about 6’x6’ and 2’ thick. Each must weigh 20 tons. There are thousands of them in the three jettys here.
So, it’s looking like we will head to the Texas Hill Country tomorrow via San Antonio. Say with us, will you?
Later...
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