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By Lynx, on May 20th, 2011 
If you are in the vicinity of the Texas State Aquarium and the USS Lexington an excellent place to grab a bite to eat is Pier 99 located in between them. We were turned onto it by a couple of city workers who kindly lead us back through the bridge construction zone to the Lexington after we got lost in the sea of orange barrels and wound up on the wrong side of the bay, thanks guys!
We loved the food here so much that this was the only place of our trip that we ate at a second time when we came back to do the Dolphin Encounter. As an added bonus the second time around we came just before the dinner crowd and got to listen to a great band warming up all to ourselves and got to meet the owner who was impressed that we actually rode the bike all the way here instead of trailering it.
Cece loves getting these giant plates of crab and shrimp samplers. It was really good, highly recommended.
My meal from the second time, I believe this was Mahi Mahi but I don’t remember now. Good but just a touch salty for me, I liked the Amber Jack much better.
Like in Oregon she ate the whole thing. How does someone so small pack down so much crab?
This is the burger that bought us back a second time, freshly caught amberjack from the catch of the day menu. Unfortunately they did not have it the next time we came, too bad as this was one of the most delicious fish burgers I’ve ever had.
Cece’s old stand by, she had clam chowder the first time. I tried it, not quite as good as the awesome stuff we had back in Seattle but still quite good.
All of the outside furniture was made from PVC plumbing and wood, interesting. After how badly my spokes rusted after the 4 days we were camped near the beach I guess combatting corrosion near the beach must be a big issue. This back area is just off the water and its hard to see but it is also covered with netting overhead, I assume to keep the sea gulls out from pestering the guests and becoming a nuisance.
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By Lynx, on May 19th, 2011 
While in the neighborhood we explored Mustang Island a bit to kill some time and have a look around. Much has changed since I was last here as a kid. The long stretches of wetlands, sand and dunes have all become colorful pastel beach houses and fancy hotels. All of these houses, no two painted the same color, remind me of pictures of some port towns I’ve seen in New England, Iceland and the Mediterranean pretty neat.
This is just for my friend Kody, it’s not too often we see anyone who’s name is spelled this way.
Well we had an unfortunate mishap during all of this after getting back to Port Aransas in the dark…
One of my auxiliary lights mounts sheared off from the many thousands of miles of vibrations and got caught between the front tire and fender. With a loud crunching noise it spit out the front of the fender but not before mangling both the light and my fender! The fender ended up with a pronounced crease down the whole length with cracked paint on the edges. These edges are now rusted with most of the paint flaked off.
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By Lynx, on May 19th, 2011 After the proposal we relaxed around the campground and went for a little walk down one of the trails in Goose Island State park when we came to a Y in the trail and took one route that promptly petered out into nothing. We figured this trail had to eventually come out on a paved road somewhere and kept going and after miles of following an overgrown pipeline trail we finally decided we were LOST! By the time we found our way back the short 30 minute hike had turned into half a day and we decided to go have fun on the beach for a few hours.
Mustang Island State park is a great location to walk up and down the beach, they even allow camping there. Its nice to have some portion of the island semi protected so you can see how it used to look before getting overgrown with fancy pastel beach houses and big hotels. We also found out later after seeing one its areas like this that are some of the last refuges for some threatened or endangered sea turtles to lay their eggs.
The beach was completely loaded with sea weed. I’m talking two or three feet deep at the high tide line. It was somewhat hard to find a way through to the water. There were a few places where the prickly stuff was trampled down a bit and we just had to climb through it. It was almost a hands and knees affair, that stuff is hard to walk on. Imagine a walking across a giant pile of chicken wire and mattress springs.
Bad timing on our part, we got here at close to high tide so there was no clear beach to walk on between the crashing waves and mount sea weed. Maybe because we got here late in the day but we had the entire place nearly to ourselves. The bathrooms out on the beach were broken down and fenced off too, that could have been part of it.
With so few people here the sea birds were everywhere and pretty much ignored us. It was great fun to watch these guys. As the surf pulls back it dredges up all the thousands of clams just under the sandy surface and the birds run out to nab them before the clams can wriggle back down into the sand. Then the waves come back in and the birds run back to shore, sometimes flying away from certain doom if they lingered too far out too long. Back and forth back and forth the birds ran, we are easily entertained.
Out on the beach bobbing in the surf I found this! Wow! A coconut here!? In Texas!?
This thing floated a long long ways from home. I don’t think coconut trees grow in the gulf. Anyone know?
The beach was not totally abandoned, there was some beach combers and a few other young couples soaking up the sun and playing in the sand.
Some guys flying some pretty amazing kites too.
Can you see all the sea weed floating in? There was no clear path down the beach except for walking in the water. That stuff kept washing in and brushing past us and getting tangled in our legs and ankles. I do not like things bumping into me in the water! I’m not scared of Jaws or anything silly like that but I have seen man-o-wars out here before on past trips.
One of the times the surf rolled in rather quickly and I found myself standing in water up to my waist all the sudden and a large black shape quickly glided straight at me faster than the little clumps of seaweed and scared the crap out of me!!! Within seconds it was about 18 inches away and got close to the surface and I could clearly see its flippers and head, “SEA TURTLE!!!!” I yelled to Cece and quickly pointed.
I was fumbling for my camera when when it saw me and it spun around in a 180 and flew back out to sea just as fast as it arrived. I didn’t get a picture but it was a pretty amazing feeling to see a wild sea turtle. From now on the theme of our anniversaries will have to be sea turtles and tree frogs.
While walking up the beach we talked to some beach combers and the woman said she had lived in Port Aransas her whole life and is out on this beach pretty regularly and had never seen a turtle out here. We felt even more special that we had seen our turtle and that it had chosen to show itself to us on this special day. They told us that we were supposed to report all turtle sightings and that there was a sign somewhere, on our way back the ranger office was closed though. We found the number the next day while at Sea World and they said sure enough the turtles were due to start mating in a week or two and we had likely seen a male coming to check out the beaches early and they marked our sighting in the log books. How cool is that?
One of the buoys offshore that kept buzzing.
And even further offshore one of the oil platforms. I would have been working on one of those if I hadn’t right about that time gotten hired on a road construction crew in Aspen, Colorado. Beaches, deep sea fishing and the ocean are nice and all but nothing beats the Rockies for me 😉
Getting ready to go, Cece showing off her new shirt that she designed in town at one of the many beach shops. They will have t-shirts of many styles and colors available and you pick out the pattern that you like and they’ll make it for you right there while you wait, pretty cool. I think her choices came out rather good don’t you?
This looks like a piece of driftwood that lots of seaweed were attached too looking at it closely all I could see was sand. I don’t know what it was, suspicious that it was in a straight line and it was the only piece of solid ground along the beach.
Those little white specks are the thousands of clams and snails that the birds were after.
One of them up close.
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By Lynx, on May 19th, 2011 
One of the main motivations for this whole trip came down to this day. I’d had this ring custom made by Santa Fe Goldworks. They did an amazing job, it’s white gold with Mediterranean coral inlay. Although I had gone to David Griego first, I went to many jewelers and artists around the surrounding area to see what my other options were and the quality either wasn’t as good or they could not get anything like this anymore as SouthWestern jewelry was no longer “in vogue” like it was 3 to 5 years ago, in those cases everyone referred me back to David as one of the best out there. I think I made the right choice. David was great to work with and I highly recommend them, it was also nice to support the local artisans during these tough times.
I took a big risk of getting the ring done with no input from Cece, would she like it? I thought the non-traditional design would reflect her Native heritage. Only through a bit of subterfuge was I really positive on the coral. One weekend while the ring was in process I took her through many shops around the plaza so she wouldn’t suspect something when I said, “Hey lets go in here!” All of the staff were in on it and pretended not to know me. It was such a relief when she gravitated towards the coral work like I had already ordered.
 Not suspecting anything... Can you see the tiny frog down by the puddle? So I’d been carrying this around the entire trip being extra cautious not to loose it anywhere. While on the bike I kept it in my nicely padded camera bag to protect it from being banged around or potentially falling out of a pocket somewhere in the vastness of Texas. When we’d stop and go inside for a while I didn’t want to leave it outside unsecured so I had to keep taking it out of the bag and putting it in my jacket pocket, being careful that she didn’t see me doing it and then reversing the process while she was putting on her helmet before we left. Trying to do this a dozen times with your girlfriend 2 feet away without getting caught, whew talk about stressful.
For a month I’d been planning on proposing tomorrow at the Texas State Aquarium at the dolphin tank or during the Dolphin Encounter we were planning on doing, whichever felt right at the moment. Well this morning when I was getting water for breakfast one of those little tree frogs was up inside the faucet again and came out with the water. I caught him and put him up on the table for Cece and this one seemed content to sit there and explore the table top and not run away like yesterdays frog.
I spilled some cold water getting the stove ready and he gently touched his toes in there and slowly got in the little puddle, he did not look happy that it was ice cold. When the water was hot I slowly poured some more on the opposite side of the puddle for him to gently heat it up and the little frog flattened himself out and snuggled his legs into his new hot tub puddle, Ahhhh! It was pretty hilarious.
While we were having our breakfast a fly came to taste a few grains of instant chai and our little buddy got some breakfast too. Between the frog and the cardinals singing and the peaceful morning with just the two of us the moment seemed right and I proposed a day ahead of plans (good thing too with all the school groups of screaming kids we would encounter at the aquarium).
Cece’s response, “REALY?!”
When I fetched the box our little green buddy hopped up on top of the stove burner and scared us that he was going to burn himself. He stayed there watching us while I proposed, our little witness.
Such a huge relief that she loved the ring and I didn’t need to keep hiding it right under her nose. Thanks Santa Fe Goldworks! She gets lots of complements on it.
Continue reading Popping the Question
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By Lynx, on May 18th, 2011 While we were killing time waiting to see if we could go out on a fishing boat we had a lot of time to explore the town of Port Aransas. Not much has changed since I was a kid, they still had many of the same old shops and restaurants and all the charter boat companies were all still there with most the same boats. Some of the small stores and restaurants were now abandoned or bulldozed and some massive new beach wear and gift shops had gone in.
Somewhere there are pictures of me and my knee high cousin standing in this sharks mouth taken probably close to 20 years ago, still looks the same as I remember.
Well some people got to go fishing… This is one of the old charter boats coming in from an overnighter.
One of the deck hands was telling us how to tell some of the beach birds apart. He said the, “laughing gulls are the ones that look like someone grabbed them by their back legs and dunked their head in a bucket of black paint.” Hahaha, they do look like that.
I’ve eaten here many times before and Castaways Seafood and Grill was just as good as I remembered. Many of the restaurants around here also have a neat policy where you bring in your cleaned catch from going out deep sea fishing and they will professionally cook it for you, pretty cool. I was really looking forward to bringing in some snapper or mackerel fresh off the boat and having them cook it but sadly our deep sea fishing did not pan out.
 - great po’boys at Castaways
The last night we went all out and went to Pelican’s landing. I knew we may be a bit out of my budget as soon as we saw the parking lot was full of Mercedes and Cadillacs. The food here was pretty good but remember to bring an extra wallet to pay for it. Really it was not much better than Pier 99 and other places we’ve tried and in my opinion not worth the extra cost.
We also tried Fins Grill & Icehouse and were not impressed. I got two recommendations from locals about Fins but if they were good at one time they really phoned it in when we were there, looking at the numerous mediocre to bad reviews online many agree with me. The food was slightly expensive and just wasn’t that great. The bread was stale, the fries were cold and the seafood nachos appetizer that we got was almost inedible. Maybe its the humidity but the chips were so stale they tasted like they’d been left out for a few weeks, the cheese was bad too, by the time they brought it it was already a cold hard lump and didn’t taste good. Not the worst nachos I’ve ever had but pretty close. The sea food bits in the nachos were great but the nachos part of the nachos was not. Strangely I’ve never had good nachos in Texas its not that hard to make and with the close proximity to Mexico you’d think they’d have some killer plates here. Maybe its the humidity and chips go stale very quickly, back home in the desert I can leave a bag open 3 or 4 days and they still taste fresh. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson and no more nachos from Texas! I may have gotten spoiled working next to BumbleBee’s Baja Grill with the best I’ve had anywhere in the US just a 3 minute walk away.
 Well they did look good at least Continue reading Port Aransas
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By Lynx, on May 18th, 2011 We had really been looking forward to getting to go deep sea fishing from Port Aransas for months prior to this trip. This is something that my grandfather would take us on nearly every summer when I was younger and hearing me talk about it Cece wanted to try it too.
We went to a couple of outfits the day before to get prices and times and decided on Dolphin Docks that I’d been out with many times before, all of the others along main street as well. They were the friendliest and most helpful with our questions. For the 8 hour deep sea fishing trips we had to be at the shop early before sunup which meant either getting up from our camp site at 3AM and riding all the way from Goose Island and hoping the road construction and ferry along the way did not slow us down too much or we could get another place to stay in town. We got a motel room across the street and had to leave the tent and stuff set up two islands away.
We had to get licenses from the gas stations the night before and were all set to go fishing in the morning!
The next morning however it was blowing hard and although the minimum amount of people needed to go out had already prepaid 4 of them did not show up the next morning and the trip was canceled. The captain said if we wanted to wait around for a couple of hours and see if there was enough for a later one we could do that. We sat and talked with the captain and owner and crew for a few more hours but by then there was even less people and it looked like the whole day was wasted. They said from the weather reports it only looked to be getting worse through the weekend as a storm system went through, the one we had been running from since New Mexico. So it looked like even less of a chance of going out the next day or on the weekend.
We went out and explored Port Aransas for half the day and by the afternoon the waters were calmed down a little and we were able to get in on a short bay fishing trip instead. I’ve never liked bay fishing, its like paying for something that you could be doing yourself but she was really set on getting to fish and we had already paid for our licenses for the day. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pics of us fishing we were too busy baiting hooks and then loosing it to small hardhead and gafftop catfish that we had to keep throwing back.
Me and Cece did not end up catching anything keepable that we could eat but we had a good time anyway. We struck out this time due to the weather, now we need to come back to try deep sea fishing!
The best places to fish, shipwrecks and places marked DANGER!
I did not know there was a lighthouse near Port Aransas. It looked quite neglected with all the buildings in a sad shape.
I thought this was pretty funny, across the bridge of this tanker ship in 8 foot high letters: NO SMOKING.
This is the owners other boat the Poly Anna shrimp boat. Its a very interesting design for a shrimper, it appears to have 3 hulls up front and 2 in the back, the one in the middle does not go all the way back. You don’t see many shrimp boats with muti hull design.
Our catch for the day, pretty slim.
One guy also caught this sting ray and I learned an interesting fact when they were discussing how to cook this thing. They said to cut it into small strips and they are pretty good. The guy wanted to know how they taste and they said exactly like clams because much of the time when you think you are eating clams you are actually eating this. So if you ever go to a restaurant and get clam meat in strips you are really eating sting ray.
Here is the stinger they cut off so nobody would injure themselves. Those serrated barbs look pretty dangerous, I’d hate to get stabbed by one of these.
Continue reading Bay Fishing
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By Lynx, on May 17th, 2011 We saw quite a lot of wildlife at Goose Island State Park. Everything from deer to snakes to a huge raccoon that tried to break into our motorcycle bag to get to some food. He was about the size of a mid sized dog, enormous! He was able to claw one zipper apart enough to reach in and commenced trying to pull everything out through a quarter sized hole! Now I realize why there are the big metal poles with hooks up top at every camp site, you can see one in the center above. We were a bit puzzled what these were for when we arrived, hammock support? theres certainly no bears that I know of on the coast of Texas.. Ahh! Raccoons, thats what they are for!
There were tree frogs everywhere as well, they would become important later. I’m not used to hearing frog noises from up in the sky while I’m trying to sleep. Each morning we had to round up all the frogs, they’d be inside the faucets and in the sinks and up on the walls in the bathrooms and showers. We’d have to rescue them all and put them back outside.
Of all the wildlife we saw I was most amazed with the numbers of cardinals we saw. I’ve never seen an actual cardinal before. They were everywhere and very vocal singers. Everywhere we’d see flashes of red darting from tree to tree.
Near the showers was a feeding station with bird feeders and some nice bird baths where I was able to get some nice pictures. The flashy males loved to pose for pictures but the females were a bit camera shy and difficult to catch and getting a male and female together in the same shot was next to impossible. Out of a few hundred pictures I only got 3 or 4 with both a male and female.
At first I thought these were the weirdest looking ravens or crows I’d ever seen. They were all black but when the light hit them just right the feathers turn a neat iridescent blue. During a phone call I mentioned the strange bluish crows with fluffy tails and white eyes and was told they were called Grackles. What do you know another new bird I’d never seen (or heard of) before. People have told me they are loud and obnoxious but the ones we saw everywhere were not, I kind of like them.
Continue reading Goose Island State Park Cardinals
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By Lynx, on May 17th, 2011 
Goose Island State Park was a great place to camp! When we arrived all the beach front sites were taken but it was probably for the best as it looked much much windier out there and there wasn’t much for tent spots either. Also with the frightening amount of rust my bike developed during this one trip to the coast, had we left it right on the shore it could have disintegrated to nothing.
From the online reviews I’d read while planning the trip a month earlier I found out that camping in the tree line was a bit risky as you’re offering yourself up as an all you can eat buffet for the millions of mosquitoes in the woods, supposedly the beach has much fewer mosquitoes. We came well prepared with bug repellent spray, bug wipes, and decided to try one of those new fangled battery powered Off! Clip On jobs. I was a bit skeptical that the fan powered repellent would work but after everything else was ineffective it really did seem to work. While siting still it worked wonders, while walking it has somewhat of a limited range and they’d still bite me around the ankles. It was nice because while we were gone or sleeping we could clip it to the top of the tent inside to keep the mosquitoes out. Most of the skeeters were going for me at first and barely touched Cece so she decided she didn’t want one of the fan repellent devices. I think she regrets that now, after I had one on and we went for a hike through the woods on a trail and ended up getting totally lost, all the mosquitoes ate her alive and left me untouched.
 Camping in the trees was excellent, nice shade from the sun and mostly peaceful with few neighbors during the week. Like always all the campers were friendly as we all talked about our trips so far and all their animals wanted to meet Cece. As the weekend approached we got group of people in a travel trailer next to us that would come in drunk at midnight and continue to laugh and party around the bon fire well into 4am the next morning while everyone in the campground was trying to sleep. What a bunch of A-holes, it only takes a few inconsiderate people to ruin it for everyone else. All our camper friends we’d made during the week complained to us about them the next day. I felt bad about it but after they did it again they got a rude awakening at sunup from the bike turned around so the pipes were facing their trailer 6 feet away. As we broke camp and left we got a few thumbs up from the other campers who were enjoying the sunrise drinking coffee LOL
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By Lynx, on May 17th, 2011
By Lynx, on May 17th, 2011 We took far to many pictures here and even after throwing out 75% of them I need to divide this into 3 posts. You’ve already seen the ones of the main building and history of Goliad. These are just random pictures of the grounds and interesting details. I’ll put up another focused on the church later.
The Presidio la Bahia is a photographers dream. There are great architectural details everywhere and unlike the Alamo you don’t need to have the patience of Job to wait for all the people to get out of the way to get the shot.
Continue reading Presidio la Bahia grounds
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