Zia Rider Blog

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.

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

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

Continue reading Our Lady of Loreto Chapel

Another GPS goof.   We were headed to Port Aransas and had just gone through the small town of Goliad when the Garmin decided we needed to be heading east instead of south like we had been all day.  What the heck?   I pulled over to zoom out on the map and sure enough it wanted us to go left to the coast and then cut back adding who knows how many miles to our route.  Why the heck would I want to go that way?   The other road did seem to be the more heavily travelled but we decided to carry on and ignore the GPS once again.

Its fortunate we did because further down the road was a awesome white mission gleaming through the tree line.  I unfortunately did not save those pictures before i lost my little camera, they weren’t very good anyway.  They wanted you to pay at the road entrance just to get close enough to get a good picture, screw that..

Further on down the road we saw this, WOW!  It looked like a weathered old Spanish fort that  you’d expect to see in Central or South America, not in Texas.   We were not planning on stopping but we took a few pictures and rode around the back wall of the extensive complex and decided we just had to stay and check this out so we were more than happy to pay to go inside.   This is the business model that the other mission should adopt.

If you are going this way ignore the GPS and take the road less travelled.  Had we blindly paid attention to where the GPS told us to go we would have missed all of this.   The Presidio la Bahia is amazing and well worth the stop. We almost had the place to ourselves there was only two other families exploring the big complex with us.

Rather than retell all of the amazing history of this place I’ve added links on all of the pictures with text to the originals so that you may read them better.   There is also quite an extensive amount of history available on the Goliad Massacre and the Presidio.   It is because of the Alamo and especially the brutal take no prisoners policy of the Mexicans during the Goliad campaign that the rebels rallied for revenge and ultimately won the war.

Everyone has heard of The Alamo but very few have heard of Goliad with a higher death toll than the Alamo and the other battles combined, infact before watching the historical films yesterday I knew nothing about it either. Goliad or Presidio la Bahia, however, is far better in terms of its preservation and authenticity. It is the only complete Presidio in the United States.  It may not have the multimedia, flashy exhibits and numerous artifact examples brought in from elsewhere like its more famous cousin but it does have an entire unmolested Spanish Fort.

Here the size of the parade grounds, the walls and all the attached buildings and the church are very impressive.  The view you see from the highway of it perched ontop of a hill it looks very imposing with its aged and weathered stone.  At the Alamo you have one building and a small section of barracks, the vast majority of the original site is under pavement and store fronts, at Goliad you get the full effect of what the Alamo would have looked like back in it’s day.

Continue reading Goliad, the other Alamo