On the Beach, the Crowded, Chilly, Still-It’s-a-Beach Beach

We finally made it to camp right on the beach! Man, have we spoiled ourselves with previous years doing this, though, because this beach location kinda sucks.

Okay, it doesn’t truly suck. No beach does, right? And here all the elements are in place: the trailer is parked on the sand with not a thing between us and the Gulf. I’m typing this in bed right now (hello insomnia!) and can hear the surf.

The bummer aspects are our timing, in that this touristy area (Aransas Beach) is packed with people here for Thanksgiving week. They cruise in their golf carts with right-wing flags flying and their versions of bad-ass music blaring, back and forth, back and forth on the beach path between us and the dunes.

And they say stuff, the usual exclamations about our fancy rig, hardly distracting me by now. But they also walk into our campsite, I guess because only we consider it “ours.” All this beach is public. But that one dude who stopped his truck and snuck up on Banjo and me while I was facing the other way, knitting, freaked me out. All he wanted was to recruit us to his artsy-fartsy RV resort at Big Bend. Announce yourself, next time, Dude. Same goes for you, lady who wants to know what it’s like to camp here. Banjo was fixing to give her a growl.

Aransas Beach’s three-day camping limit suits us fine. It’s been chilly and windy (jackets!), but Tracy went birding in the morning anyway.

There are a few flamingos on the coast here, having been blown in on storms. This one does not appear to have a tag, so it’s probably not Pink Floyd, the escapee from a Kansas zoo who’s been hanging around the Port Aransas area for 25 years.

Can you believe there’s another escaped flamingo named Pink Floyd, this one in Utah at the Great Salt Lake? What hardy creatures! And how lame we are at naming them. (These pictures are both by Tracy.)

That’s cool to see this one, though. What’s not is that right when we left the last site, I rotated my knee something fierce. And I’ve barely been able to walk. (It’s a problem with my tibia that I got fixed in Wisconsin this past summer.) That’s why the sitting and knitting. I did get a great recommendation for a chiropractor in Brownsville, so I’m gonna hang on until then. Just two more travel days.

Here’s an outtake of us trying, before the sun set completely, to get a shot for a Christmas card. We had like two minutes, and you can tell. I’m now laughing at our big hats, our Crocs (Tracy’s on board now), our mismatched clothes, and Banjo’s defiance.

Jacqui, GDTR’s official photoshopper, might be able to swap out Banjo’s head from another shot. I didn’t want this one to go to waste though, because Banjo’s expression suits my mood here.

Onward! Padre Island National Seashore is next, which is one of the loveliest places I’ve seen. I’ll be seeing it from a seated position, this time, but that’s okay.

Edited to add: We may stay here an extra day, then go straight to Brownsville. It would save my knee two hitching and one unhitching events, plus I can sit in a chair right outside the trailer here and look at the beach.