Mexico

Nov 24-Dec 4 Alamo, Texas
We drove 200 miles to Casa del Valle RV Park where we will be staying for 2 months. This is a nice sized park, well maintained, with very friendly people and staff, and lots of activities. Our friends Linda, Jerry, Dot and Floyd are also staying there. We have been visiting and doing activities with our friends. We have been to flea markets, shopping, eating out (lots of that), Mexico (more about that later), walking, swimming (not Ches he can only swim at the bottom of the pool) and meeting new people. We had a nice Thanksgiving dinner at the club house with our friends, we are lucky we get to celebrate Thanksgiving twice, once at home in Canada and once here in USA.

Mexico

Mexico here is basically the same as the one by Yuma except that your have to pay to get into Mexico 25 cents and to get out 30 cents and pay tax on liquor $1.25 a bottle. The other difference is the security with a tank and soldiers behind sandbags. Ches and I got a haircut ($5 for women and $4 for men, seems sexist to me) and Jerry got a pedicure and they charged him more ($10 for men and $8 for women, also sexist). Linda and I went back and got pedicures, not anywhere as good as the one I get at home, but nice.

rockport-pelicans, big tree

Nov 19-23

Ches and I enjoyed seeing dolphins swimming in the channel when we went for a ferry ride. I also enjoyed watching some pelicans swimming, they would all swim in a line then they would stop and go in a circle and all dive in and try to get some fish. I was fascinated watching hundreds of ants marching in a row each carrying a leaf or blade of grass. I followed them for about 200 hundred feet (a very long distance for a tiny ant) and then they would take their leaf down the hole and go back for another (at least I think it was the same ants after all they all look the same).

Drilling

they were drilling for gas at the RV Park. they work 24 hours day. they moved it to another site in the park while we were there and it only took them one day to take down and move the equipment from one site and set it up on another. We talked to the manager of the project who is in his seventies and has worked all over the world.

The rig set up and drilling

This is after finished drilling

This is setting up at another site

Big tree

The tree is over 1000 years old and is 35 feet around the trunk. The town is very proud of it and has almost made it into a monument

Christmas tree
they decorated a tree in the park

Corpus Christi-Texas State Aquarium

Nov 18 Corpus Christi
Dot and Floyd joined us and we went to the aquarium, had lunch and drove a circle drive around Corpus Christi Bay. I loved looking at the beautiful homes along the water, some are huge. We took a little ferry at one part which, is like the Albion ferry but smaller.

USS Lexington

Texas State Aquarium
This is a nice little aquarium and we were lucky that there were several bus loads of school kids when we got there and they were just leaving so we practically had the place to ourselves. They have lots of volunteers who told us about the different marine life as we walked around.

There was a dolphin show and they wanted a volunteer so Dot volunteered me. It was really quite neat to be so close to the dolphins and I gave them hand signals and the got to feed them fish.

me giving signals to dolphins

We were just in time to watch a diver feed the fish, stingrays, and turtle.

Beaumont-Rockport-Fulton Mansion

Nov 14 Beaumont, LA

We drove a couple of hundred miles to Beaumont and stayed at a Walmart.

Nov 15 Rockport, Texas
We drove 310 miles to Rockport. There were gusts of winds as we were driving and one caught the awning and it ballooned out and ripped. We stopped at a bar by the freeway and pulled out the bar that holds the awning and cut out the awning material. We had to leave it there because it is 20 feet long and we had nowhere to put it. After we settled into the Bay View RV Park in Rockport we were having lunch and we got to watch 2 does and a fawn walking around right near the RV. There is a resident alligator but I never saw it. There are lots of birds here.

Nov 16 Fulton Mansion
Ches and I took a tour of the Fulton mansion. This is an 1877 house built in French second Empire style. Unlike Melrose this house had been empty for years and used privately for commercial uses like a campground so it was in very bad shape when the Parks and Recreation took it over. They are celebrating 25 years of restoration and still have many needs, although the mansion itself has been restored. There are only a few of the original furnishings but the house has been furnished with replicas for some to match originals (for example dining room chairs to match 2 original ones) or furniture from the time period. They have records of what furniture was originally bought. The house is in a nice setting overlooking the gulf of Mexico, but the grounds still need a lot of work. The interesting thing about the family who built the house is that they lived into their eighties and celebrated their 50th anniversary.

Original mirror

The house was very modern for the time with 3 bathrooms with running water and flush toilets when most houses of the time did not have any indoor plumbing.