Beach Camping Is the Best Camping

This! This is why I live in a trailer.

We’re back on the beach near Galveston, Texas, exactly where we spent a week last year, because it is just the perfect spot for us.

It’s not in an ocean-side campground; it’s not a camping spot with a palm-roofed tiki bar. What it is is a beach all to ourselves.

That’s what you get when you boondock on a strip of shoreline that allows camping, but when it’s a little off-season and with a little bad weather, just enough to keep most everyone else away.

This is where Tracy’s super-canny brain comes into play so well for us. Some people are intimidated by camping like this, but he’s read recent reviews of RVs driving on the sand here so knows it’s firm right now. He’s driven us down to the end of the camping permit zone, then turned around so we’re facing out in case we have to leave in a hurry. He’s found the perfect spot up near the dunes so the high tide doesn’t get us but we’re not too close to soft sand. The truck is parked right where we can easily hitch back up if the conditions turn bad, but Tracy’s watching the tide charts and the wind and is confident. We’ve been here three days so far.

The weather was warm and sunny right when we showed up, so we set up our outside living room between the trailer and the water and spent all evening outside. I have to admit I was so high from i the relief of finally being on the beach that:

• I asked my resident bartender to make me his margaritas and drank two of them right quick.
• I quasi-learned how to play Me and Bobby McGee on the ukulele and sang along as if I were the only person on a wide beach at night. (I was.) But then I drunk-texted a video of it to friends.
• I unwisely wrote a blog post that I had to rewrite the next day. (If you read my hitch post right after I published it, I’m so sorry.)

I’m so glad we had that bright afternoon and warm night on the beach, because this storm rolled in right after.

What are we doing at the beach when it’s kinda cold and windy and wet?

Banjo’s eating beach debris.

And she’s exercising her hip that she sprained on the Natchez Trace. She is not an athletic dog, and while hiking on the trail she pulled or sprained something in her hip so that it would tighten up while she slept and we’d have to carry the danged dog in and out of the trailer and the truck. Now she’s enjoying trotting along the beach so much that she’s loosened that hip and is back in action. Her kind of action, which looks like this:

I’m looking at shells.

As well as messing around on the uke, making a tiny house, and bugging friends online. The sweet factor of camping on the beach is that even when the weather is bad, you can sit in your living room and still hear the water, see the sand, be at the beach.

Tracy’s learning things, as usual.

He found a website where all the shipping vessels are tracked via GPS (it’s actually called AIS), so every now and then he’ll pop up excitedly with the name and length and destination of so-and-so freighter coming out of Galveston going to wherever.

Tracy’s also birding—and planning. We have three weeks before we expect to land in Brownsville for the winter, and this time we’d like to spend it traveling down the Texas coast, camping on the beach (or right near it) as much as we can. Last year we were in a hurry to get settled in to our site at Brownsville so we could order stuff and get it delivered to us (hallelujah for an address), especially the Starlink system. We’ve got that now, and the only stuff waiting for us in Brownsville is work we have to do to the truck and trailer, so we’re not exactly in a hurry.