Monday, January 24 at Falcon State Park in the South Texas Plains was supposed to be cloudy with a bit of sun around noon, but the rain started early and kept up until about 4pm. Janine’s spirits were lifted by a random call and visit with Loran Millard, who got the day off work with a COVID diagnosis. Luckily Loran wasn’t terribly sick but tired of being tired and really ready to rest up and get over it (essential so she could start back up training for all the bike events on their busy calendar!). It was also a great day for researching options for a new trailer, getting started on truck purchase, and reading and napping.
Around 4:30 we were able to get out for a brief walk around the campground and a visit to the really charming Butterfly Garden, which led to a late dinner followed by some reading (Mike found a couple of TV stations, but none in english!) and another early night.
Tuesday, forecast to be the best day of the week (sunny and 70’s high!), we woke to a complete chilly fog-in. It lifted on-schedule around 10am and by noon it was dry enough for us to head out for a ‘road ride on mountain bikes’. Based on our Saturday exploration, checking maps and looking at www.ridewithgps.com, we decided to ride out to the Salineno Wildlife Preserve. The rangers at the park HQ had given us a hand-drawn map, and it was highly recommended by camping neighbors. On our way, we took a quick detour to ride through the nearby Falcon County Park that offers free camping (even if in a somewhat run-down facility) with actual hot showers and no stay limit. Almost unheard-of in boondocking! If only there was more to do here (ie better bike riding)… Anyway, it was otherwise a pretty uneventful ride out, on roads that got smaller at every turn, heading directly toward the Rio Grande.
Almost at the brink of the river, we reached the Preserve, where we discovered the most charming birder’s paradise. At a tiny 2.5 acres, the Preserve centered around a larger RV where the ‘host’ lives (5 months a year) when not at home in Iowa. He and his sweet white lab host a viewing area complete with outdoor ‘carpet’ and chairs, shaded by his RV awning, looking out into a small clearing with about 20 birdfeeders, several water features, and birds galore!
Some chairs freed up on our arrival so we sat and watched for about 30 minutes (a good challenge for Janine!). We saw Cardinals, Green Jays (kind of like our bluejay), Orioles, Red-wing Blackbirds, and even a Great Kiskadee (big bird, kind of like a guinea hen). Of course that last was according to our host, we had to take him at his word!
On our way back to camp, since we were on the mountain bikes, we took a couple detours to explore and to add some time to our ride, but we found our way back to our campsite all too soon. It was clouding up again, so after quick, wonderfully hot showers, we spent the afternoon and evening inside, except to catch this great moment… clouds to make good sunsets!
Wednesday, we managed to get in a decent ‘real’ ride (ie not looking around in tourist-mode, and more than 40 minutes!!!). Since pretty much all the roads except the main highway had turned out to be dirt, we took out the mountain bikes again and enjoyed some great gravel riding for a few hours as the weather went from sunny to cloudy to sunny to cloudy several times. Rain was forecast for the afternoon, but happily it never materialized! We were especially grateful for the REALLY HOT showers as the bathrooms were on the chilly side.
Thursday was forecast to be rainy (and it was), so we had planned for it to be a CHORES day, in preparation for departure on Friday. In the morning, before it really started raining, Janine went for her first run (more of a run/walk!) since the back strain – almost a month – so she had some immediately sore quads. Then in a light drizzle, we loaded up the truck with laundry and associated paraphernalia and headed back to Roma. The laundromat we had spotted on Saturday turned out to be closed, so we trekked on another few miles to the next option.
After doing laundry, we decided to get some mexican lunch to power us through the afternoon, and settled on Carnes Asado Gordo, a place that perfectly toed the line between ‘authentic’ and scary. And it did not disappoint!
MENU AND RESTAURANT PHOTOS
We’ve been noticing some differences between California mexican and Texas mexican food (not sure this really the ‘Tex-Mex’ you hear about… more like South of the Border! 1) they don’t have burritos on the menu. Much to Mike’s disappointment! But you CAN get huge flour tortilla tacos. So that works… and 2) don’t bother looking for things like Carnitas, Pollo, Pastor and other familiar “California Mex” meat names. We actually had to use the phone for translation, to even begin to guess what to order!
Check out the menu.. Just to satisfy your curiosity, Guisada=stewed Chicken (fair); Piccadillo = seasoned ground beef (good flavor); I’m guessing most will guess that Barbacoa is barbequed Beef, but it is just seasoned like with a spice rub (really good); Machacado is a northern Mexican type of air-dried and spiced beef that resembles shredded jerky, often mixed with huevos (eggs!); and Chicharon Prensado is Carnitas (pork) pressed into a cube in some strange way involving an unknown fat, sliced and fried. But tasty! Huh!
We ordered a bunch of tacos in different flavors to try them all, and as we were hungry and curious, we decided to get the Jueves (Thursday) Especialidades de la Semana – Parillada. The waitress told us it was a ‘bunch of meats’ and who could resist that? When it arrived, it was grilled strip steak, chicken breast and some incredibly good smoked sausage. The tacos were good, but the Parillada was INCREDIBLE!! We felt quite bold and worldly! We can definitely speak mexican menu – or fake it!! We somehow managed to eat it all, and rolled on to our final stop of the day – the local library for some internet. We donated a few dvd’s we had watched, which seemed to make the head librarian’s day, then got down to business, catching up on email and blog postings in the 2.5 hours before they closed. We love libraries!!! Then we headed home, too full to even think about dinner so we settled for some snacks pretty late in the evening.
Heading from Falcon Lake to Corpus Christi
Friday morning, January 28 was more of the same weather but colder, so we seized the dry moments, broke camp and were on the road before 9am, when the rain was forecast to start. We had a longer (3 to 4 hour) drive planned, and were excited to head to Corpus Christi and Goose Island State Park, featuring a campground right on the Gulf of Mexico (Ole!). It is a bit more touristy on the coast, and we really wanted warmer weather and less wind, so we planned to stay just for the weekend, glad we could get reservations!
The drive was pretty uneventful, mostly on flat back roads through more of the very brown South Texas Plains, but we could see some green, and actual trees cropping up as we approached the coast. In spite of some challenges driving through the northern/downtown area of Corpus Christi, where there is a LOT of highway construction going on, we arrived safely at Goose Island State Park (a really charming smaller park with great campgrounds, although it doesn’t seem to actually BE an island…!) in the early afternoon on Friday January 28. It was warm enough that we were able to open out both beds and all the windows, and put the awning out to get everything dried out after the many recent wet days. Wonderful! We had enough time for an hour-long ‘exploratory ride’ (quickly becoming part of our arrival routine!) on our mountain bikes around the park and vicinity and a quick shower before it started to cool down at dusk. The focus of our ride was a stop at the ‘Big Tree’, an incredible oak tree thought to be about 1000 years old! Made us a little homesick, thinking of Chico’s own Hooker Oak Tree which we’ve seen photos of, but never got the chance to see in person. It fell in 1977, and was also thought to be about 1000 years old. Coincidence? Hmmm!
We had a big day planned for Saturday, our one full day ‘at the beach’. We started with a chilly hour of birdwatching with the camp ‘bird hosts’, a couple who happened to be camped right next to us! They even loaned Janine a pair of (really nice) binoculars. Along the shoreline, we saw lots of coots, herons (grey and white), a crane, and a whole raft of bufflehead ducks. Then we moved over to the oak trees and saw some cardinals and an apparently rarer Pyrrhuloxia LINK!!, a bird which looks somewhat like a female cardinal! Sorry I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo…
By 10am it was warming up just a bit so we jumped into the truck to begin our Corpus Christi adventure with an hour-long drive to what we hoped was a decent bike ride. The fun started, accidentally, with a quick (and free!) ferry ride across the Aransas Pass (lots of “passes” here, as well as bays, inlets and straits, but not a hill to be found except on the many causeways!) to Port Aransas on Mustang Island!
Our planned ride was an ‘out and back’ on a hopefully quiet road between Mustang Island State Park and Padre Island National Seashore, with one turn and a small bridge crossing from one island to the other, about half-way. When we arrived at Mustang Island State Park by 11:30am it was sunny, windy and maybe 60 degrees. Brisk!
The road turned out to be quite busy with the usual 70 MPH traffic, and incredibly rough-surfaced (and with an even bumpier shoulder) except for a few miles of silky-smooth road within the National Seashore. Windy? Check. And to complete the experience, there was even a small town in between the Park and the Seashore areas, with a major construction project on our road, for about a mile and a half. On the way out, we still had a shoulder to ride on, but we could see that on the way back we would be sharing the single, NARROW lane with the vehicles, which did not seem like the most prudent plan. We soldiered on, planning to worry about that problem later.
We were hoping for views of the shoreline, but what we got was a straight flat route with views of brown grasses for miles and miles… We jounced along the ridiculously rough road, and were at last rewarded when we arrived at the National Seashore! At the entrance, we had a nice visit with another cyclist (one of two we saw that day!) who recommended that we should definitely continue on for 5 miles (of SMOOTH PAVEMENT!) to the Malaquite Visitor Center, which boasted an elevated viewing platform. From there, we could see the camping area as well as the actual Gulf of Mexico AT LAST.
We turned back and enjoyed the first 5 miles of smooth pavement (with a tailwind, no less!) immensely. Then without much enthusiasm we began the 15 or 20 mile slog back on the rough County road, found a detour through the construction zone on the way back and ended up doing almost 50 miles, somehow with a headwind both ways!! The longest ride we had done in a couple months. And the hardest, in spite of being totally flat.
After that, we were ready for some serious refreshments! We’re always looking for local breweries, and found exactly what we were looking for at Lazy Beach Brewing, located in a warehouse area south of Corpus Christi, where we did a good sampling of the brews and enjoyed some really good jalapeno queso with a variety of chips. Highly recommend!
From there we planned to drive through the historic district featuring the last remaining Victorian homes in Corpus Christi, and conveniently right on our route back to Goose Island and our home on wheels. Unfortunately due to the crazy construction on all the highways around the downtown area, we realized at the last moment that we had missed the exit but we got a good aerial view of the houses from the overpass. DOH! We decided that was close enough and kept on rolling, as it was cooling off fast with dusk,, and the hot showers were calling our names! Then dinner, a movie and bed. A FULL DAY!
Sunday morning, we had a leisurely wake-up, pack-up and departure. We were a little sad to go, since we really enjoyed the beauty of our grassy, tree-lined campground. In fact we both agreed, it was the nicest and prettiest spot we had camped in, so far! Quiet, green and full of flourishing oak trees, this part of the Gulf Coast was quite a contrast to the greys and browns of the south Texas plains we had become accustomed to. The other thing that amazed us was the huge number of people we saw fishing – in boats and from the shore. Mike learned that he can fish at State Parks (and even keep the fish!) without even having a license. Amazing! Another great option for lazy days!
But we were eager to get to someplace more conducive to bike riding, so it was time to move on. Since our drive to Choke Canyon State Park was on the short side, we decided to take some back roads, where we saw lots of drilling equipment, cows and a quick return to the everpresent flat brown landscape on the otherwise uneventful drive. We arrived at Choke Canyon State Park around 1:30pm to sunny skies even if the weather was cool!
Returning to the South Texas Plains, we shouldn’t have been surprised to find a pretty flat, brown and windswept landscape at and around Choke Canyon State Park. The facilities were a bit rundown but more than adequate, and really benefitted from the groves of hardy oak trees scattered around the lake.
The forecast was pretty good through Wednesday, and then cooling with rain for the following few days. After setting up camp in a nice secluded oak-lined campsite, Janine got on her bike and went out to explore a bit while Mike tuned in to the final Superbowl playoff game. It was a beautiful afternoon, if a bit windy. Warm and sunny, the day brought out some wasps and other little critters. On her ride, Janine saw a white-tail deer and a huge herd of about 25 javelinas slowy ambling across the road. At the boat launch, there must have been close to 75 trucks with boat trailers. Clearly a boating park! Mike enjoyed the playoff game, and after dinner we were out!