Friday, February 26, 2021

Camping Near the Ocean

I thought about calling this post "Camping on the Beach," but to be completely accurate we didn't *actually* camp on the beach...we camped back behind the dunes where they had power and water.  Still, we could clearly see the Gulf of Mexico from our windows!  This last stay was at Sea Rim State Park, a small park on the Gulf more or less due south of Beaumont and 10 min from the closest tiny town of Sabine Pass.  

This is a better view of our campsite...

...but this one kind of shows the ocean.  It's really there if you zoom
in to the background...the thin blue line on the horizon.

When we departed our previous site, the state park was still advertising that they had no water after the storm, so we completely filled our fresh water tank before leaving our previous site.  When we arrived, they informed us that they did finally have water, but that they had a boil water advisory, so we just used our fresh tank for water until the advisory cleared (it cleared the second day of our stay but we didn't find out until the 4th day...we were fine either way).  Again, living in an RV has its perks during disasters!

Unfortunately, we had a little bit of an incident with a concrete pole at a gas station on our way here...we didn't even feel it or realize we'd done it until we parked the RV, but we managed to put a sizeable dent in one of our basement doors.  Fortunately, Aaron is very talented and even on the road managed to pop the dent out and repaint enough that it's not too visible from the distance.  It's a bummer after all the time we spent repainting the RV in the fall, but all in all the damage is pretty minor, we're lucky.  And we've learned our lesson that any time Aaron feels that the fit is tight at all I need to be outside helping him navigate!!  We'll properly flatten the panels and repaint once we get back to the farm in West Virginia.

The original dent and blue paint transfer

Clever wooden device to put pressure on the door to pop out the dent

Finished product - the dent is basically gone and with the touch
up paint you can't really tell its dented from a distance

Back to our travels...the state park was so remote that we had basically no signal for our Verizon phones.  It would fluctuate between no signal and 3 bars without us really moving at all, so we just didn't try to use the phones.  Fortunately for Aaron's internet fix, AT&T's signal was adequate enough for our cell-based data service to work.  This was a neat stay in that we felt well and truly isolated from everything.  We took daily walks/bikes/drives on the beach (yes, you can drive on this beach too!).  Aside from a trip to the grocery store and a trip to Lowe's we didn't really make any excursions outside the park here, we just relaxed with our view of the ocean.

Walking on the beach

Driving on the beach

Biking on the beach (in the ocean was staged...I cycled back 
and forth over and over for Aaron to get this perfect shot
with the waves...mostly we stuck to the sand)

Sunset viewed from inside the RV

My favorite of many birds we saw at the park - a red winged
blackbird

One downside here...the bugs.  During they day things were fine, but at dusk the bugs came out in SWARMS.  At first we thought they were mosquitos, but after killing about 15 of them and realizing only one had smashed into blood, I googled...turns out we were mostly plagued by midges, commonly mistaken for mosquitos.  I took a close up of the midges...couldn't actually get a mosquito to land on our window to take a picture.  Most of the midges had fuzzy antennae and a curvy body.

You may have to zoom in to see all the little tiny dots...we
thought at the time that they were mosquitos, but after further
research I'm pretty sure they're midges

Definitely a midge

One of the more interesting parts about this stay was all of the oil activity in the area.  We literally drove through the middle of an oil refinery on our way here.  We could see oil drilling platforms on the horizon while we were on the beach, and found what appeared to be a scrap oil rig graveyard in Sabine Pass.  It was fascinating to watch the steam and the flame towers and all the interconnections at the refineries.  It was surprisingly beautiful to drive back them at night - because the oil refineries are mostly pipes and platforms, with few walls, all the lights on all the landings made the refineries look like Christmas trees all lit up at night.  Unfortunately I couldn't get a good picture of the nighttime lights.

Literally driving through the oil refinery

Some abandoned (?) or scrap (?) platforms in the water next
to Sabine Pass

Oh and one last thing...we learned more about the local term 'washeteria'...I'd seen this a few places in Texas, and assumed it was some Spanish version of laundromat.  I was totally wrong.  Turns out that there was a local laundromat chain with the name Washeteria (pronounced like cafeteria), and much like Kleenex for tissues or Xerox for photocopies, the brand name was adopted by southern Texans to reference any laundromat.  The original chain no longer exists, but the washeteria name is still used on signs where in other parts of the country I would expect to see the word laundromat.  Learning more about common life outside our norm!

This is our last stop in Texas - now we begin the long trek back to Florida.


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