The End is Near!!!

Thursday, May 9, 2013
Pioneer RV Resort
Port Aransas/Mustang Island, TX
Weather, sunny, upper 70s

Wahhh, it's a whiny day, LOL, why can't Mr. C be retired already?  Today is our last day of being "beach bums".  Today is clean up and pack up day, as we prepare to return home from our month long stay along the Gulf Coast of Texas.  Our time here on Mustang Island and Corpus Christi area has been wonderful.  Full of sunshine.  Not horribly warm--in fact, this entire month, I have not had my swim suit on a single time and I'm going back to Illinois as pasty white as I left a month ago, LOL.  Oh well, I'll have all summer to try to get a tiny bit of color.  I happen to have a vitamin D deficiency, so it's okay for me to be out in the sun getting a tiny bit of color.  I don't make any effort to get burned, that's no fun, but I don't wear Sunscreen much as I need the sunshine and ultraviolet light.  (If I were going to be out in the sun all day long in the middle of the summer I would take precautions and wear sunscreen, I'm not stupid, just have to try to reach a happy medium, as the Vit D foods and supplement just don't do the job).  Ok, enough whining, what do I have to blog about today.  Some interesting finds this past day or two, and another new accidental polymer clay cane finished.

I'll start with the Polymer Clay Cane.  A month or so ago, I was trying to make a particular flower cane that didn't end up being what I had planned, it ended up looking just like a beautiful Dahlia.  Funny thing  is (to me anyway), I've been trying to repeat it ever since, and although I've been close, can't seem to reproduce it.  So I tried again this week.  It's not a Dahlia, but I've been trying to figure out a way to do a mini Carnation (or large carnation) for a long, long time, and this Dahlia try came out looking just like a beautiful red mini Carnation.  Don't ask me how or why, but I have 7 more Dahlia/Carnation canes, in various

colors, started and we'll see what they end up being, LOL.  At least I have beautiful accidents.

Last night, we finally made a low tide while it was still fairly light out. Our entire trip the low tide has always been in the middle of the night.  Since low tide is the best time for finding sea shells, and since we have not had much luck finding sea shells along the Texas Gulf Coast, we wanted to try during a low tide.  Last night, low tide was at 8:46 pm and sunset was at 8:07 p.m.  There is a short amount of dusk or twilight between sunset and dark.  We tried the first beach around 7:45 and, nope, no luck, no shells to be found.  You can see, Mr. C was even in on the hunt this time.  We knew this would be our last night on the beach, as Thursday would be our clean up and pack up day to get ready to head for home on Friday morning, bright and early.  We will disconnect our water mid day on Thursday, so we won't want to get sandy or salty, as there won't be water for showers Thursday night.

One of the Heron's was watching us closely.  

So we jumped back in the truck and traveled up the beach a ways (remember, in Texas, the hard part of the beaches are considered roads).  You can see in a couple of these pictures where we went from the sandy beach road to the pavement.  No luck there, either.  We left the beach and drove up the main road to a beach further to the West/South, I'm not sure what to call it when the beach/road curves to the south as it's going west.  

 Anyway, we finally made it all the way to Packery Pass Beach again (the furthest West/South beach on Mustang Island) just before dark and hit the Sand Dollar Jackpot.  Lots of WHOLE little tiny sand dollars and some other common clam type shells, but we  haven't even found any of those this trip, so I was happy.

So, what else did we do yesterday or the day before?  We saw a sign on the side of the road shortly before our campground that said, Own your own RV site and a very pretty looking RV Park.  They also rent out sites, for slightly more than we usually spend.  It has full hook-ups, mostly back in sites (although a few were pull-ins), a pool, and beach access.  We decided to go find out what this was all about.  

We've read a little about this kind of thing, where you purchase your RV lot/site, pay a monthly or yearly upkeep fee (like a condo fee) and the park rents your space out for you when you're not there.  We are not sure exactly how this works (and maybe someone reading this can fill us in a bit more, I hope) but we assume the "rental fees" are applied towards your upkeep fee or you split them with the park or something like that.  

So we decided to drive through the park "to see what we could see".  It was lovely, I said to  Mr. C, "Oh, I could so live here."  Here are a whole bunch of pictures of some of the RV sites at this Park, starting with their office and welcome center.  These pictures are all of completed landscaped etc. sites, there were also a few "unimproved/undecorated" ones, too.  There were beautifully decorated sites, lots of plants and fences and privacy and decorative things as well as practical ones, like nice outside seating areas and brick bbq/ovens.  It was really nice, something we've never seen before for RVs.  I really liked what I saw, during the drive through, we didn't go talk to anybody because they listed a website and we decided to look there first, to see if we could find any details.  Unfortunately, the website did not answer our many questions, but it did answer the most important one, price, LOL.

That evening we looked up the website, and although it didn't give us any details of "how" it works, it did give us some prices.  The unimproved sites are $42,000.00.  The already improved sites that some people are selling range in price from $59,000 to $149,000.00.  WOW!!!  The funny thing is, just up the road a bit (or would that be down the road, if it's south west?) there are signs for house lots "starting at $30,000".

So, we came back home and drove through our park.  Supposedly you can't live here full time, you can only rent and only up to 8 months, but we saw many sites with fences, and plants and other things that make it obvious "some" people live here full time.  It's not nearly as fancy as the other place, but I could easily spend 8 months here, especially during the winter, LOL.

So I took a few pictures of our park, too, including our campsite.  The one with the Big Sky on the front is our 5th wheel.  It's not bad, not nearly as decorated with trees etc. But it has 2 pools, a recreation hall, and a pond.  This is the first day we've driven around our park and from our campsite, you can only see the cat tails around our pond and can't see much else.

When we drove around, we could see the open part of the pond and found a campsite we'd like to request someday in the future, with a clear view of the pond.








Look at what we saw at the pond:   Our own Roseate Spoonbill.  He/she is beautiful, and I think the pictures are pretty good.

 

 I guess that's all I have to report today, and obviously the next couple days will not have much of interest going on.  We'll be in Waco, TX tomorrow night, which will be a new campground for us, then back to Little Rock, AR (where we stayed before) and Sikeston, MO (where we stayed before), and then home on Monday.

We'll be on the road for Mother's Day and for our 24th anniversary (we can't believe it's been 24 years already, where does the time go?), and then Mr. C returns to work on Wednesday and we've been told we already need to mow, so guess I'll be doing that and unpacking the trailer the rest of the week.  I know sometime next week we plan to see the new Star Trek movie, but other than that, it's back to business as usual.

Oh, one other thing we've discussed.  After much thought and discussion, we've decided we should give Galveston another chance.  Mr. C actually liked Galveston as much or maybe even better than Mustang Island, TX.  He reminded me of how much I liked it when we drove out of the city to the more "country side" end of the island.  We decided part of our problem with Galveston was the awful weather while we were there kept us from actually experiencing anything in Galveston.  Although Galveston itself does not have all the stores we frequent, Houston is just a freeway drive away and since most of our shopping is done on-line anyway, that doesn't really matter, either.  We still don't know where we will live after retirement.  We figure we will travel a couple of years (as long as health and "youth" hold out) and keep looking.  Mr. C does say he believes we'll end up along the coast somewhere as my allergies don't bother me when we're on the coast, and when my allergies are under control, my Fibro is more under control, too.  For me personally, my Fibromyalgia seems to be quite connected to my allergies and sleep, so those are the things we focus on to keep the symptoms to a dull roar.  So, that's our story and we're sticking to it.  I suspect we'll take a quick trip to town today and have dinner at Golden Corral so we can go ahead and get the trailer packed up early.  We have a fairly long drive tomorrow and we'll be up and on the road by 6 am.  So, thanks for joining us on our travels. We hope to find you "Chasin' Rainbows" with us another day, until then. . . Smiles, Sue C