As usual this is a double entendre. We have been enjoying the wild life at the beach this week. We visited Ocean Park on the Longbeach peninsula in Washington. Long time friend and reader of this blog owns a condo on the beach. We parked Arcturus in the driveway. We had to back and fill several times to stuff all 52 feet of our rig in the space allotted to her condo. The windshield was 4 inches from the eves of the garage. Renee, Neil and Georgia came and Neil’s folks, Jerry and Janene and Neil’s brother Mark also came. The occasion was the celebration of Georgia’s third birthday. You will want to go the web site and see the photos of the birthday girl.
Tag Archives: wildlife
Riding the Scappoose Dike Land:
We have moved over to St. Helens for a few days this week. We are getting our annual dental checkups and visiting old friends. Today we jumped onto Path, our recumbent tandem bicycle and rode from St. Helens to Scappoose. Then we rode around the Scappoose dike lands. This is some farmlands that have been developed from the flood plain of the Willamette River many decades ago. The main highway of the region is US-30. It is four lanes and roaring along at 55 plus. Turning off onto the dike road puts us on narrow twisting roads with practically no traffic.
Mittry Lake
Sometimes our life is one long campout. This has been one of those weeks. We joined up with a small group of friends near Yuma, AZ. We were camped on the desert on the shores of a small backwater off of the Colorado River called Mittry Lake. We were almost roughing it. We had no electric, no running water, no cable TV, no cell phone and no internet. We did have sparkling clear skies and a full moon each night. We sang songs around the campfire, had pot luck meals and coyotes yelping right under our windows in the middle of the night.
Matagorda Bay:
We have kicked back for a couple slow days at Indianola Park at the edge of Matagorda Bay. This is an estuary that forms the mouth of the Colorado River here in Texas. About 15 miles to our south-west is a line of barrier islands and then the Gulf of Mexico. On the map of Texas this bay is about half way between Galveston and Corpus Christi. The bay is about 350 square miles, and this afternoon when the wind came up we had some pretty impressive surf a hundred feet in front of the coach.
We just finished up a week of work-camping with our friends at Lutherhill, a Lutheran Youth Camp in the summer season. Our friends, Arnie and Mem, care for the grounds during the winter season. We did a few handyman tasks to justify our stay, but mostly we hung out with friends and went to the Opry in La Grange. (See our blog for Feb 20, 2007,(Under construction, link to come) for our last visit to the Opry)
The really nifty part of this location is that we dodged the latest freeze cycle a little further north of here. We woke up to 61 degrees this morning. We rushed out to get in a bicycle ride this morning before the predicted noontime rain. The rain squall caught us about five miles away in Indianola, Texas, a couple hours before predicted. Oh well, We won’t complain, Texas is a couple buckets short for the last two years.
Another advantage for this area is the abundance of birds. We have been logging gulls and terns, shore birds and Sandhill Cranes. We have spotted egrets, herons, pelicans, kingfishers and hawks.
Finally the camping here is free. Now you would think that the place would be overrun, but quite the contrary, it is only sparsely populated. We are “dry camping.” That means no electricity, no water, no wi-fi or cable T.V. There are a few fishermen and also a few full time travelers like us here too. We just met a couple from the Netherlands. They shipped their little European compatible camper over on a ship and they are touring our country for a full year. Just a couple weeks ago we met a family from New Zealand who were doing the same thing.
Meeting interesting new people is one of the rewards of our nomadic style of life. In fact as I sit here humming a few bars of Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville,” I find it hard to even remember what it was like “Workin’ nine to five,” with Dolly.
So Long from South Texas now where did I put that salt shaker?
Gary and Judy
On The Brazos
In Texas the Brazos River starts somewhere near Lubbock and flows into the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles West of Galveston Texas. We visited the Brazos in Brazos Bend State Park about fifty miles south of Houston. Now Houston is the largest city in Texas so we carefully tiptoed around the edges of the city to get there. Brazos Bend is very rural and that was part of the attraction for us. What we found was bird-watching programs, nature walks, miles of trails and the George Observatory.