What we did on our Summer Vacation

Baby Bean and I made our way first to Houston, then drove with our friends to Mustang Island, one of the barrier islands along the Texas Gulf coast. Port Aransas sits on the edge of the great ship channel that leads to Corpus Christi, one of the USA's largest ports in tonnage. You can't imagine how immense the landscape is! Pictures cannot do justice to it. Port A is really just a fishing town, and Mustang Island is relatively undeveloped, so the beaches are uncrowded. Here is a picture of the lovely dunes:

And here is the Gulf of Mexico:

Mostly we just hung out on the beach -- we set up camp with our chairs, towels, and a cooler of sandwiches and drinks. Naturally, in the late afternoons the moms enjoyed wine packed in the cooler!
The girls played in the waves and in the sand. Here is Baby Bean wading out into the water:


We love to go beach combing and we also like to check out the local wildlife. I have lots of bird pics on film not yet developed, but will share some of our beach finds. Here are the best shells we found -- I think you can read it if you bigify. Baby Bean found the lettered olive shell in excellent condition. It still had the snail in it -- dead, yuck -- so we had to boil it.



We discovered there were thousands of olive shell animals in the shallows, so Baby Bean and and her friend AddieBean gathered them up in buckets, along with hermit crabs:



This is some kind of wierd sea slug -- I haven't been able to identify it. It moved around and had blue dots on it!! It is right underneath the seaweed.


We found out that the state shell is a lightning whelk, but we didn't see any of those.


We also went on a cruise in the ship channel to watch dolphins -- we saw lots! Here is a picture of the Lydia Ann Lighthouse on St. Joseph's Island. It is still used, but is not part of the US lighthouse system. It was first built in 1840s, but was rebuilt after a hurricane in the early 20th century.
I love looking at the Sky Watch pictures over at the Dughallmor Beagles, so took lots of Gulf Sky pics. Here are two:


On the way home, we couldn't resist stopping at a shop in an old house in Ganado, TX called Granny's Attic. Look what I bought -- a chair for my porch! I took Mishcat's advice and framed my spore print, you can see here:


I generally don't do long posts, so if you got this far, thanks for looking at my pics!
We had a really good time on our trip!