The Ferry

We are at Port Aransas, Texas for the next few weeks. Port A is on Mustang Island, part of the barrier islands along the Gulf of Mexico.

You can get here from the south from Corpus Christi, but you have to go through town with all the traffic and unless you are going shopping on the south side, it’s easier to take the ferry.

As soon as you leave Aransas Pass on 361, there are signs all along the 8 miles telling you what to expect or do for the ferry.

During spring break this can be much longer. Mom and I waited about 30 minutes last year for a “quick” trip to get groceries.

The sign is true, no matter what vehicle comes up the road it gets on the ferry, including motorhomes, school buses, ambulances and semi trucks.

You finally get to the ferry and just do whatever the deckhands tell you to day and go wherever they tell you to go (the wait today was at least 15 minutes).  There are up to 6 ferry’s that can run from shore to shore depending on traffic. Today there was only 3 running.

This is actually us on the ferry. It was only us and another pickup on one side, and 8-10 cars on the other side to balance us out.

Then you get off the ferry, drive a couple more miles and you get to see this:

Woo hoo! (it was 81 degrees yesterday :)

San Antonio Missions

Yesterday afternoon we went to the San Antonio Missions National Park.  These are a chain of missions established along the San Antonio River in the 1700’s.  They were established by the Spanish to spread Christianity among the local Indians. I’m not going to give you the whole history here, you can find more information here:

http://www.nps.gov/saan/index.htm

and here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Missions_National_Historic_Park

Two of them, Mission Concepcion and Mission San Juan are still used for church services now, while the third, Mission San Jose is currently closed for renovations so we couldn’t go inside the actual church.  There is another, Mission Espada, that we didn’t stop at.

Mission Concepcion:

The church looks much like it did in the mid-1700’s. There are some paintings inside that you can still see.

Mission San Jose:

Built in 1720. The stone walls are still around this mission with the living quarters around the outside. The church’s roof collapsed so they are in the process of renovating it. 

Mission San Juan:

This mission was moved here in 1731. Most of it is in ruin, except for this portion. I love the bells. It is still used as a small church today.

Today we leave San Antonio for Port Aransas. More tomorrow!

On the road

After weeks of anticipation, we are finally on the road. We packed our shorts & flip flops and left the cold and snow of Iowa on Friday.

We are headed to see this:

But of course, on the way we need to first drive 1,300 miles through Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.

Tai is doing pretty good. He was pretty mopey the first couple days without Roxie, but he’s doing better. He has the entire platform in the truck to himself, which he likes. Although he still feels the need to put his head on Al’s arm.

It’s been nice to not have him go nuts when someone comes up to the truck, or when we are walking him. We don’t have to worry about him going after another dog or person. (I’m thinking positive!)

We stopped the first night in Carthage, MO (home of Precious Moments, in case you needed to know this) at a nice little campground. They didn’t have the water on yet, but it was almost full of campers & motorhomes when we got there at 9:00.

When we first started doing this trip a few years ago, I looked on Diner’s, Dives and Drive-in’s website to see if there was any of the restaurants featured on our route. Clanton’s Cafe in Vinita, OK is one that we have thought about stopping at before, but the timing just didn’t work. This year we decided to actually stop and see how it was on Saturday morning.

It was completely full when we got there with only one booth left. It was good, and very quick. I don’t think we were there 20 minutes from the time we ordered until we were done. And the total bill was only $9.00.  When we left to go back to the truck, there was a truck and horse trailer parked next to us with a bull in it that was not at all happy that we were there. He wanted to climb right out of the trailer. I’m not sure if he saw Tai, or Al, but he wanted to get at one of them.

We only had one small calamity with the camper this year. One of the doors in the kitchen evidentially came open as we put in the slides and bent the hinges. We don’t use it anyway, so we just took the door off.  Not bad compared to what we have had in years past, so I will take it.

More tomorrow…

Goodbye Roxie…

Tomorrow Roxie is going to her new home in Michigan. For those of you that know what’s going on, I wanted to let you know that tomorrow is the day. If you don’t know what’s going on, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go too much into it.

I will only say that you can bring a pet into your life and your heart and give them all the love you can, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out like you thought it would. We have loved her for 5 years and she has been a huge part of our family, but it’s time to let her go to a better family that can give her what we cannot provide. I know she will be better off, but we will miss her terribly.

We will miss you.

Something to look forward to….

I haven’t written a blog entry in a while because there really hasn’t  been much going on.

It’s cold (I think it might have gotten up to 1 degree today) and snowy and more cold and snowy. It’s February in Iowa, so I don’t know what else we expect, but it gets pretty old.  No sun, icky roads, freezing temps. I’m so glad that I can work at home and that I don’t have to drive the nasty roads to work.

We went to a hockey game two weeks ago with Al’s sister, and went bowling last Friday with Carol and Bob, Joel & Katie. We didn’t do anything for the super bowl. (to be fair we did have three invites to parties, but they were all either Steelers or Packers fans, so we  just stayed home. We would have either had to choose one, or go to all three and miss the commercials!). All in all it’s been pretty boring lately.

We had a nice blizzard last week with 10” of snow and 40 mph wind. So much wind that we had to wrap the AC, which we have never done before (it’s a company provided house, how nice is it to have central air? We wouldn’t know). Albeit we should have wrapped it from the outside during the fall when it was nice out, but hind sight is always better, right?

But we do have something to look forward to…..

Only 10 days ‘til vacation!

We have been looking forward to this for several months, and it’s sooooo nice to know that it’s so close.

Al spent his Christmas money from mom and Scott on new waders at Bass Pro Shops.

The dogs didn’t like them much, though. (yes, I was watching A River Runs Through It, I love that movie!)

Al has been working on new blocks for the camper. In addition to these, he also has three that look like Plano tackle boxes. These will go with the “Coleman coolers” that we already have for the back of the camper. He can’t just have normal blocks. I think they do look pretty good. It will make people take a second look and wonder if we are using 12-packs for camping blocks!

It’s close enough now that we can look at the 10 day forecast for where we are going. Instead of the average 0-30 degrees here and snow, we can look forward to 70’s. In only 14 days from now we will be looking at this:

http://www.thedunescondos.com/cam.cfm

(I just thought of this after I posted….you have to wait until it’s daylight to look at the webcam, it’s live…come back tomorrow!)

I can’t wait!!!!