Hopefully the last of the cold here…

Wow, we can’t believe how chilly this winter has been down here on South Padre Island. Yet another cold front has brought winds, low temperatures and fog into this part of the southern tip of Texas, 

We will leave the coast and Isla Blanca Park after the weekend and are looking forward to a change. This winter has felt a lot like hanging out on the Oregon coast in early June… cold, wet and windy. I should mention that the temperatures along the coast in the winter are generally cooler for the highs of the day and warmer for the lows of the day when compared to temperatures inland.

The difference could be as much as 10 degrees or more on each end. As a result there were some days we drove over to Brownsville to walk around rather than stay on the coast because it would be in the fifties on the island and the upper sixties inland. We have come to call this stealing a good weather day…

Unfortunately this latest front has brought temperatures which start in the mid forties and barely raise into the fifties. Four straight days of this in the southern tip of Texas in late February has us really anxious for warmer temperatures. Looking ahead to our next stop in Alamo it appears we will finally get them once when move.

Of course we will miss our daily beach walks, the occasional trip to the brewery on the island and the walks along the boardwalks at the Laguna Madre Nature Trail. However we are ready to go and experience new adventures inland in the Rio Grande Valley.

And hopefully much warmer temperatures…

I have included pictures of the beautiful Roseate Spoonbills we have seen during our stay here. A small factoid about these spoonbills is that they get their color from the foods they eat. Crustaceans and other aquatic invertebrates contain pigments called carotenoids that help turn their feathers pink. The more carotenoids their food has the pinker they get which explains why the juveniles are mostly white.

NOTE: We are currently in South Padre Island TX until March 1st…

South Padre Island thoughts…

As our stay is nearing an end here on South Padre Island it is time to start planning for our move on March 1st. Our next stop will be inland in Texas for a month. We  originally booked another month here on the Island for the month of March.

However instead of spending another month at Isla Blanca Park we decided it best to cancel our stay. We did so for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was we would have had to move to a different site and the site we were moving to wasn’t a very good one at that. Since we have to move anyhow we figured we might as well move somewhere nicer.

Another surprising and significant reason we chose to leave was the slow but certain realization that we simply don’t want to be here anymore. Why? Well, for one we have done everything there is to do (that we like to do anyway), not once, but several times. One challenge of staying long term on an island is that once you enjoy everything there is to do on the island it is an hour or more away from every other place to explore.

As much as we will miss our daily walks on the beach it was during one of these walks we came to the realization that we were ready to leave. More significantly we also learned something about ourselves.. We now have decided we no longer want to live right on a beach.. We aren’t saying we wouldn’t live close to a beach, it’s just that being in a beach town 24/7, 365 days a year is surprisingly now not in our future plans.

While we have eliminated South Padre Island as a future home we know there are plenty of other locations to check out. From here we will move over to an RV resort in Alamo Texas a good hour plus away where we will be able to explore life in the Rio Grande Valley sans the beach. We may not have a lot to do there as well but at least it will be different.

Next we’ll move north back toward Canyon Lake Texas to visit our son and his family again before starting a trek east. We will also spend some time in College Station, Texas (our original hometown) where we will finalize our spring and summer plan of exploring potential future places to live along the way to North Carolina to visit with our daughter and her family.

Hopefully as we visit more places looking through this new lens we will discover more about what we want and don’t want in our future home.  We have also come to realize that our home finding quest will be a marathon and not a sprint as it will probably take a lot of time to find just the right place where we can fully enjoy an active outdoor lifestyle.

Todays pictures are from the various places we have enjoyed during our stay on South Padre Island…

NOTE: We are currently in South Padre Island TX until March 1st…

Is Covid still screwing up your plans…?

We are back in the Rio Grande Valley for the winter. To celebrate we broke out the crystal and toasted to a hopefully good winter stay. We stayed at Isla Blanca RV Park last winter while were hiding out from Covid. We were also able to have our first two Covid vaccines here. Last year everything was shut down pretty tightly and thus it was a great location for us to ride out the unknowns of the Covid pandemic.

Fast forward a year later and nothing much has changed on the Covid front. We wanted to stay at Isla Blanca again hoping to be able to see what it was like to be here without a pandemic but alas, not much has changed, at least not for us. While many here in Texas have grown tired of the pandemic Sharon and I still respect the might of Covid and are staying pretty close to home.

That said we do have a few outdoor places we have enjoyed, as we did last year. We often hike at the Convention Center’s Laguna Madre Nature Trail and we often visit the deck at South Padre Island Brewing Company. Before the omicron variant of Covid hit the USA we were just beginning to feel pretty comfortable visiting some indoor places and being around a lot of people.

However, when the omicron variant reared its ugly head and proved to be much more contagious we began to retreat from both indoor places and people once again. Therefore here we are in South Padre Island one year later doing basically the same things we did last year when things were much more unknown.

While some will say we are crazy not to just live our lives and not worry about getting another version of the “flu” we have different feelings. While we both realize the disease is not extremely deadly it is the fear of having the symptoms for a lengthy period of time as the many who now have Long Covid. In addition, Sharon’s having survived breast cancer along with several previous bouts of pneumonia over the years have her really wanting to avoid covid.

I actually can't imagine what it would be like to not be able to smell or taste. So much of our lives revolve around food, drinks and the culinary delights in the many towns we visit. We both can’t even imagine not being able to enjoy two of our precious senses. That alone is enough for me not to take any unnecessary risks.

In the meantime we are enjoying our daily routine of walking the beach together  (weather permitting). so the photos today will be of some of the delights we see with our eyes and enjoy with our ears. Two other senses we value greatly…

NOTE: We are currently in South Padre Island TX until March 1st…

Estero Llano Grande State Park and Exit Plan Update…

There are several state parks down in the southern tip of Texas and we like to visit these as much as possible. We always purchase the annual Texas State Parks Pass because it allows us to in free and also has some free camping perks. All of the State Parks in Texas are unique in that they are home to species of flora and fauna found nowhere else in the entire USA.

One park with nice trails is the Estero Llano Grande State Park which is part of the World Birding Center. We like this park because we  can enjoy a hike while also birding.

Upon arriving at the park visitors walk right up to the visitor center adjacent to a small wetland pond. Every time we have ever visited this park this pond is covered in ducks, mostly Black-bellied Whistling Ducks and this visit was no exception.

We stopped to check out all the waterfowl even spying a couple of Shoveler ducks, one of Sharon’s favorites. Also, while watching the ducks we noticed that they were becoming a bit nervous so I scoured the sky and discovered the reason why… A Peregrine Falcon was soaring high above which alarmed the waterfowl below.

We spent the afternoon hiking and birding at the park and reflected on how we have always enjoyed exploring different parts of our beautiful country. It is opportunities such as this that we know we will greatly miss once we are no longer on the road. Hopefully we will find a place conducive to our love of the outdoors which will fend off the boredom we fear in our next non mobile lifestyle.

And to provide an update on our progress of figuring out what the next chapter of our lives holds for us… alas, not much new has happened on that front. We still don’t know what we will do or where we will end up but we have eliminated a few more states and now only have 17 on our list. We are now focusing on towns in each of the seventeen states so I would assume things will not happen much faster.

We do our research independent of one another so it will be interesting to see what each of us found once we compare notes. Thankfully we have plenty of time for this decision as there is nothing “forcing” us to decide immediately such as health or finances. As long as that remains the case we will simply plug along and continue researching then perhaps begin visiting towns on our lists to see if any place feels like home. For now home is still wherever we are parked which currently is in South Texas….

NOTE: We are currently in South Padre Island TX until March 1st…

Thoughts About Our Phoenix Stay and What’s Next…

When we decided to modify our beginning of the year plans due to the impending birth of our daughter’s baby girl in North Carolina, it gave us time to pause and reflect. While I sat for a few months alone with the RV in Rockport Texas and Sharon was in North Carolina helping our daughter with the new baby, I had some time to begin seriously thinking about what’s next for us after we stop RV’ing.

We know we won’t be RV’ing fulltime forever so we need to iron out what the next chapter of our lives will look like. Thoughts about this process led to us deciding to cut short our planned stays in the pacific northwest this past summer and instead focus on the southwest.

We decided to take advantage of Cal-Am’s fall special where we could stay at several of their parks for an inexpensive price. We did this to answer a few questions we had about Arizona. One was could we live in Arizona during the cusp seasons of early fall ad late spring? Another was could we settle down in cities such as Phoenix or Tucson? And lastly, would we like to live in a Cal-Am Park? Or as the top photo suggested… Does X mark our spot?

We booked a month in September at Sun Life RV Resort in Mesa AZ. This would be the first of three Cal-Am parks we would visit. What we learned while staying there was we really like Sun Life and what Cal-Am offers it’s residents. Our next month in Mesa Regal was equally enjoyable.

The difference between the two parks is mostly size. Sun Life is a much smaller version of Mesa Regal. Both offer way above average facilities and both are fun places to stay (during season) and are conveniently near just about anything one would need or want.

What is it about our stay we didn’t like? Well there were two huge negatives to us. First was there is no way we want to live in an area where the daytime temperatures rise well past 110 degrees Fahrenheit! Overnight lows during this time (September) seldom dropped below 90 F. We found this to be way too hot for active people like us!

The other big negative to the Cal-Am parks is that they are very expensive in their monthly fees. It is $8500 or more annually for site rent/HOA fees. Monthly charges for sewer/electric/trash are quite high as well. We understand they have great amenities but we could experience the same amenities in apartment complexes at a much less fee.

Have we completely eliminated living in Arizona? No, not yet… but we have decided if we do so it would have to be seasonal… We are now in Tucson staying at our third Cal-Am park and wonder what we will think after this stay is over…

NOTE: We are currently in Tucson AZ until December…….

2020, Recapping a crazy Covid year and the vaccine!

A year ago we were sitting in Mesa Arizona happy as clams. In less than a month the news broke that China was experiencing what could become a pandemic. By late January Covid 19 found its way to America (and likely had made it here sooner). By the end of February concern crept into our minds as to how this would affect our travel plan for the summer.

Our Arizona stay would end March 1st so we decided instead of making a trip up to Washington, Oregon and Montana for the summer it would be best we just head to Texas and “hide out” until things cleared up.  We made a mad dash to the Hill Country where I had a two week reservation on Canyon Lake at a Corps of Engineers Park.

We planned to use those two weeks to figure out where we would shelter in place. Alas, a few days into our stay all COE parks closed including the one we were staying in but a Ranger visited us to let us know those of us who had reservations could stay so as to allow us time to find alternative stays.

A few days later we had another visit where we were told that since the park was closed the management decided after realizing many of us were full-timers with nowhere else to go that we could stay in the park until it reopened. Relief!!! We had a safe refuge!

How lucky were we to be able to stay at Canyon Lake in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas while the world around us tried to figure out how to live with Covid! We fell into a routine quickly and let the days pass hoping for an end to the pandemic. As the weeks passed the management became itchy to reopen and we were told that the park would reopen in May.

We now had to make new plans. We decided that we would just move around in the more rural areas as Covid seemed to be more rampant in the cities. We worked our way through east Texas and into Oklahoma. We planned to just slowly make our way  to North Carolina. Along the way we had a surprise invitation to stay at a friend’s farm in Virginia. Again, how lucky we were to have another beautiful place to hide out.

A few months later as time rolled into September we moved on down to North Carolina to socially distance visit our daughter. While in NC we made a reservation for Key Largo hoping that by the time we arrived there things would start to ease up and we could winter in southern Florida.

As we ambled our way through South Carolina, Georgia and into Florida it became apparent that we would likely not be wintering in Florida. The Florida Governor wasn’t the least bit concerned about Covid and it seemed as most of the Florida residents weren’t too concerned either. So after our stay in Key Largo we ambled our way out of Florida and beat feet to where we decided to winter.

That brings us to where we are now in South Texas on South Padre Island! We have been here a month and feel as if we are very lucky to have chosen this destination. It is really easy to social distance here as our site is spacious with lots of vegetation, birds to watch and we can visit the beach everyday with a short walk,  We will be here until the end of February. As we approach the year’s end we had one more lucky thing happen to us.

A friend of ours who lives in Brownsville Texas told us that if wanted to get the Covid vaccine early we should go the the University of Texas -  Rio Grand Valley and park our butts in line to maybe receive the vaccine. I read online how to register for the vaccine and off we went to stand in line for 6 hours, (yes 6 hours}. It took that long because those with appointments would jump to the front of the line while every now and then a trickle of those of us without appointments would be called in.

Yep, 6 hours later we were happy to have had the first shot of a two shot series of the Moderna vaccine. Four weeks from now we have our appointment for the second shot and two weeks later we should be fully vaccinated. Sharon had a headache with a low grade fever that night and both of us have a little arm soreness at the vaccination site, but otherwise all is good. Even during a pandemic we feel like we have been very fortunate this year…

Happy New year!

NOTE:  We are currently in Port Isabel in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas for the winter… 

Migrating South–A New Philosophy…

As the leaves have begun to show signs that fall and cooler weather have arrived, it is time for us to start our migration south. During normal years I would be excited about the trip planning to our winter destination but this year, with Covid-19 so prevalent, I am not so excited to plan this journey.

Why is that? Well for starters we are on the east coast and when we are on the east coast we like to explore the small towns and larger cities to enjoy what they have to offer. Out west we focus on hiking due to the abundance of  public lands available to discover nature’s beauty and solitude. We also like to visit local breweries everywhere we go to taste different craft beers and support local businesses while visiting.

With Covid-19 still holding the USA in its clutches these type of visits simply won’t happen for us. With me having a science background and education we take Covid-19 very seriously and do our best to avoid any situation in which we don’t feel as though we can be safe in. While we will still visit an occasional brewery they must have ample outdoor seating as we will not visit one with only indoor seating. Yes, we are very cautious.

With that in mind as we plan our travels south we will drive slightly longer distances and stay at places for shorter periods. Where we normally like to travel 100 to 150 miles we will stretch that to a couple hundred miles at a time between stops. Likewise we normally like to spend no less than 3 nights at any given location but now will often only spend 2 nights.We will stay longer at places which offer what we feel are safe activities during this pandemic. Oh, how glad we will be when this is all behind us.

Our first stop was one we have been to many times before as it is a nice distance away from Raleigh NC and easy to get into and out of. Bass Lake RV, a Passport America park, is under new ownership and now only takes Passport America for one night but we were able to use our Good Sam’s discount for the second night.

All we did while during our stay was to walk around the nearby lake, catch up on our laundry and watch some college football. Yes our team the Texas A&M Aggies took one on the chin from Alabama but it was to be expected. We are still avoiding laundromats by using our portable ZENY Portable Mini Twin Tub Washing Machine. We bought this back in March when the pandemic chased us out of laundromats and it has not only kept us safer but has pretty much paid for itself by now.

NOTE:  Our next stop for us will be Colleton State Park in South Carolina for three nights.