Unusual Things Found On The Beach

We have not spent much time on coasts in our lives, so we have been delighted by the variety of things we find each day on our strolls on the beaches of South Padre and Mustang Island. Some days we find a myriad of tiny crab shells, other days there are numerous deposits of sea vegetation, one day we discovered a large crab with areas of bright blue on its body, there was even the time we found a live hermit crab, but a real surprise was the day we found a small shark!

Maybe because it is winter and most of the folks in campgrounds are adults without children, we didn't expect a large sand castle installation on the beach near our RV park. The sand fortress lasted a couple of days before the tide rose enough to erase it.

On a recent walk, the weather was warm and sunny, with a balmy wind. We saw our first kite, flown by a gentleman from his armchair.

Happy Holidays!

We are enjoying the full time camping lifestyle we started late this year. The first part of this year was dedicated to preparing our house for sale; removing wallpaper, texturing and painting, packing and removing our personal items, replacing window treatments, landscaping, replacing the roof, cleaning and staging the house.

Our realtors showed the house a couple times each day and held open house each week, so we got very adept at living lightly to keep it ready to show on a moment’s notice.

A truly daunting task was evaluating all of our belongings to see what we really wanted to keep, put into storage, and eventually move to Oregon. We decided that we couldn’t take our furniture, most of our clothes, hundreds of books and a good portion of “stuff”. So we sold and donated all of the extra things.

During the 3 months the house was on the market, we researched potential RVs, spending our spare time visiting dealerships to determine which features we needed in an RV and truck. When the house sold, we purchased a new 2008 Doubletree Select Suites 5th wheel RV and a 2008 Chevy 1-ton duel wheel diesel Silverado.

John bade farewell to his friends at work on Halloween and started a richly deserved early retirement.

To date, our camping travels have taken us to Austin, San Marcos, Corpus Christi, and Port Aransas, TX. We returned to Terrell to spend Christmas and New Years with friends and family in the Dallas area but the weather turned cold and we were forced to cut our visit short and return to the warmer climes of south Texas. Hopefully we'll get to see everyone on our next visit.

January finds us back at Gulf Waters RV park on Mustang Island near Port Aransas, Tx.