The skies were blue and cloudless this morning. The winds were still blowing 12 mph, but it was a tailwind for our drive today. We left the campground at 8:40 and crossed the bridges to the mainland leaving Galveston Island. We took I-45 for a short distance to Highway 6, thus avoiding the Houston area. Highway 6 is a 4-lane highway through some small towns, but there was light traffic.
Highway 6 brought us to I-69 for a short distance and I-69 turned into a Highway 59. Highway 59 was lightly traveled going southwest toward Corpus Christi. We were out in the country except for a town scattered here and there. There was a sign letting us know that Highway 59 will eventually be turned into an Interstate as it already connects to I-69 out of Houston for a ways. We crossed the Navidad River where the banks were lined with blooming cactus plants.
There were many rice grain elevators and storage facilities mixed among the farm fields. Texas does grow a lot of rice in this area.
We planned to stop for cheap fuel in Victoria, but after we pulled in we discovered that the pump was out of order, so we had to move on. We checked our app for other cheap gas and ended up stopping for fuel just on the other side of Refugio, TX at about 1:30. Unfortunately, their prices were incorrectly advertised at $4.79 which was the cash price, so we ended up paying more with credit ($4.99/gal). We’ll try not to make that mistake again. It was just a short distance from there to Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi is tucked into a bay and is sheltered by Padre and Mustang Islands. It has 100 miles of beaches on undeveloped barrier islands. The USS Lexington stands as a museum there in the harbor, but we didn’t see if from the road. We could see lots of oil refineries producing gas on the outskirts of town. We arrived in Corpus Christi about 2:00.
We left the mainland and crossed over to Mustang Island on the causeway and via the John F. Kennedy Bridge which you can see in the distance.
The bridge was one lane due to construction and the lane was very narrow. The driving was a little nerve-wracking for Bob in such a tight area and I think I might have had my eyes closed for part of the time. Good thing Bob didn’t!
From the bridge, we got our first look at Padre Island.
We knew we had arrived when we saw the Island sign. We are spending the next two days on Mustang Island and the following two days on Padre Island.
We had 12 miles to go on Mustang Island and we were getting anxious to get to our final destination for tonight. We passed Mustang Island State Park which has RV camping that we could see from the road. The campground is right on the beach.
Our destination today is Gulf Waters Beachfront RV Resort in Port Aransas for the next 2 nights.
We pulled into the parking lot of Gulf Waters Beachfront RV Resort to check in at 3:00 and were escorted to site #754. It was a 251 mile drive taking 5+ hours.
Each site is privately owned and landscaped according to the owners wishes. Bob was able to find 4 lots for sale for a price of $300k-$450k depending on the amenities it has. Some have tiki huts built for shade which is nice. Some sites are more elaborately done and more fully equipped than others. It’s fairly expensive to stay here by campground standards at $90/night, but in planning our trip, we figured out that this would be a good place to spend my birthday tomorrow. Our site is located around a pond and near the boardwalk to the beach.
This is the view from the window of our bus. It reminded me a lot of home with a view of the water right out of the window.
We got all settled in and Auggie enjoyed watching the ducks on the pond. We didn’t need the AC since there was a nice, cool seabreeze blowing. We met our neighbors, Cindy and Gary, from Evergreen, Colorado who stopped over to introduce themselves while Bob and I were sitting outside. We chatted with them awhile before dinner. They were a very lovely couple. In fact, everyone here goes out of their way to be very friendly. We cooked our steak on the grill and had a later dinner. We were both very worn out from the 5-hour drive. The highways that we chose for our route today turned out to be better than we thought they might be as far as traffic and road conditions and that was a plus. They weren’t your typical interstate highways so we weren’t sure what we might encounter. All in all, the drive was very uneventful, but long. After dinner, we took a short walk on the boardwalk to get a view of the Gulf. We were surprised to discover that the boardwalk was golf cart and sand-bike friendly.
Atop the boardwalk, we could see down the beach in both directions and there was very little activity except for a few fishermen and people enjoying the view.
Bob noticed an oil rig offshore and with my camera I was able to zoom right in and see it.
Leaving the boardwalk, we took a short walk around the campground and enjoyed the evening as the sun went down. We turned in early after a tiring day.