Leaving Livingston
We were planning on leaving Livingston, Texas on Wednesday, December 9th. On Tuesday night it started to rain, and it continued through Saturday. Not just hard rain, it was of Biblical proportions. We played cards and Scrabble and decided to leave on Monday the 14th. In the interim we discover that we had a leak in the waste tank. It only leaked after about 3 or 4 days of use, so I guessed that the leak was somewhere on the wall of the tank. Since no leak was visible it had to come out to be repaired. The guy that fixed the Jeep said he could do the job, so we took the bus to him on Monday. He thought he might be able to get the job done by Friday. The thought of spending the week in a Livingston motel did not appeal to us. Since we do not have any suitcases we packed up several of out finest plastic grocery bags and head toward Houston. I'm sure it looked like the Clampetts moving into the motel.
We stayed south of Houston so Tuesday we head to Galveston. We head to Moody Gardens where they have a 3-D I-Max and a rain forest inside a giant glass pyramid. We see an amazing 3-D movie about Mark Twain. There was also a demo of 3-D animation. It was spectacular. The images seemed to loom just in front of your face. The place was full of kids who kept reaching out to try to grab the images. We stayed for the second movie, the Nutcracker. Lame.
We went to the rain forest. It was a great place. There were hundreds of butterflies loose in the place. Some had 5 inch wing spans. The place also had birds, plants and fish from rain forests from the Americas, Asia and Africa. The birds were pretty tame and would fly or walk very near. This is a must see in Galveston.
We went to a fishing pier on the gulf coast to watch the fishermen. This is a little different than the fishing we were used to. We were hooked.
We return to Galveston on Wednesday and go to the piers on the north side of the island. Shrimp boats would pass by with hundreds of gulls swarming around looking for a handout. After visiting a ship museum it was time for lunch. There was a restaurant on the pier and we pick a table outside. The first row of tables on the very end of the pier was taken, so our table was under an awning about 10 feet from the end of the pier. The people on that first row were finished so the got up to leave. The gulls soon swarmed the tables for food left on the plates. New people came, and when the waiter brought their food on a tray, the gulls would attack and the waiter would carry with one hand and fight off the gulls with the other. Ten to twenty gulls were trying their best to get a free meal. The diners had to hunker over their plates to keep the gulls at bay. When one of them would lean back a gull would dive toward the plate. The gulls would settle down on pilings and rails waiting for the next opportunity. When you get twenty excited gulls in a feeding frenzy at least one of them takes the opportunity to lighten their own load. Gull droppings are not like the droppings you see in the bottom of a canary cage. From a few feet the droppings spread out to the size of a silver dollar. I was flashed back to when I was a child and my grandfather asked me, "Do you know what that white stuff in bird shit is?" "No Gramp." "Well son, that's bird shit too."
You wouldn't want even the white part of the stuff on you and it was raining the stuff. We laughed until our sides ached. Two women had their napkins draped over their plates. I would go back there to eat again. Pier 22. We left before one of the winged rats could lob one under the awning.
We went to the East Beach where we saw a man using a net to catch bait. It was a round, weighted cast net like you see people fishing with at tropical lagoons. He was after mullet fingerlings to use as bait to catch flounder. Catching one's own bait is a big part of fishing here. That helped us decide that it would be nice to winter on the gulf.
We picked up the bus at about 2:00 PM on Friday and head toward Houston. The tank was not leaking, just a plastic fitting that only leaked when there was enough poo in the tank to create high pressure.The mechanic had the tank completely full of water to demonstrate that the leak was fixed. I told him that I would get out my hose and dump the tank into his dump station. He told me not to go to that trouble, just pull the bus over and he would dump it onto his lawn. A three inch stream of water(?) shot out of the drain and the flow lasted several minutes. I told him that I wanted about 10 to 15 gallons of water left in the tank, so at the appropriate moment he waded into the puddle and closed the poo gate. We added chemicals and detergent to give the tank a good cleaning while we traveled.
We had spent several hours in the motel in Houston checking out Corpus Christi on the Internet. It had Sprint PCS, which would make life easier for us. A fellow RV'er had recommended a RV park in Corpus Christi, which did not appear in our directory of campgrounds.
We blow into Houston at rush hour. By the time we are on the southwest edge of Houston it is dark so we pull into a 24-hour K-Mart parking lot and spend the night. We wake up at 5:30 AM and eat at Denny's so we can get an early start. One hitch is a pea soup fog. We wait around until around 9:00 AM and it appears to be lifting so we shove off. As soon as we get on the highway the fog rolls in again. We creep along and get CB reports of several multi-car wrecks around Victoria that had both lanes of the highway closed. We finally find a rest stop and park to wait for the fog to clear and the highway to open.
We go to the recommended RV Park in Corpus Christi. The place is great, with a real look of the tropics. We got a large corner lot, about 30' by 75'. We step out of the bus onto a 10' by 30' concrete patio. We have several unfamiliar trees on our lot and a palm tree across the street. The park is located on a peninsula near the bridge to South Padre Island. We learned that the temperature here is usually 5 to 10 degrees warmer than the official Corpus Christi temperature because of the water on three sides of us. (As I write this it is Sunday, the Giants just whipped the Chiefs and there is freezing rain in KC. It is 9:00 PM here and it is 75 degrees. It got down to 60 last night.)
We are about 200 yards as the crow flies from the beach, and less than a mile to a lighted pier. The campground is owned by a nice couple. Perfect. The rent here is only $140 a month and you have to be retired to get in. We told them to put us down for three months. The Phone Company comes out tomorrow to install our phone service so we can make local calls and have an Internet connection.
After spending so much time in Livingston, a town of around 5000 people, we decided we couldn't take wintering in a small town. Corpus Christi has a population of 400,000 and has several art shows that we are going to try to get into. We are going to start cranking out some beads and fused glass jewelry soon. Tomorrow, after we get the phone installed, we are going to go get a couple of fishing licenses, a cast net and a couple of giant fishing rods and reels. First things first.
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