My walmart wasn’t much to look at, but it had the most important ingredient, an edge looking out on nature. <\/em>So I am able to angle the van into a nice view of scrub oaks and grass and pretend I’m not where I am.\u00a0 I awoke to the sound of a raven convention<\/em> on my roof in the morning, which is kind of un-nerving.\u00a0 Who’s tapping on the roof of my van and why?\u00a0 Oh, it’s a bunch of f—ing crows, cracking nuts or trying to break in or just crapping all over everything for no particular reason.<\/p>\n

Starbucks and wifi, then off to be somewhere nicer.\u00a0 This part of Texas is all refineries, wildlife refuges, strip malls, and cattle ranches.\u00a0 It would be pretty if you took out the refinery part.\u00a0 After fifty miles of that I made it to the Bolivar Peninsula<\/strong>, which turned out to be about the most blown-out, un-pretty stretch of prime beach front I’ve seen anywhere in the US.\u00a0 It had the makin’s of a great place – standard-issue endless white sand, gulf-front exposure on the left, bay-front exposure on the right, but the houses were few and they were run-down and often for sale, and there were few supporting businesses.\u00a0 The strip malls were half-deserted.\u00a0 I think one of the occasional giant hurricanes must’ve knocked the crap out of this place not too long ago. [UPDATE – indeed, it was Hurricane Ike, which caused cataclysmic destruction of the Peninsula – reducing the region to rubble and causing severe, permanent change in the shoreline<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 That pretty well describes what I saw two years later]<\/p>\n

I am heading to what is probably my final ferry of the trip.\u00a0 This one was super low-key.\u00a0 The ferry just hangs out till it fills up, then they close the gate and sail to the other side and do it all over again.\u00a0 No schedule, no stress, no charge!\u00a0 mellow, dude.\u00a0\u00a0 But haha, they got me later.\u00a0 One of the causeways between barrier islands west of Galveston had a $2 toll, so I did not escape.<\/p>\n

The ferry lets you out at the eastern tip of Galveston<\/strong>, which was exciting to me, because of that great old folk song<\/a> about the Great Galveston Flood<\/a> of 1900 (“death comes howling on the ocean, death comes you gotta go”<\/em>).\u00a0 Apparently the storm surge was so huge it washed over the entire island, and this is a pretty big island.<\/p>\n

Unlike poor beat up Bolivar Peninsula on the other side, Galveston is very cheerful and user friendly.\u00a0 My iPad tools found me an all-you-can-eat Italian buffet, with beach view and wifi, which is pretty darned good for just showing up hungry in a strange place.<\/p>\n

I continued along the beach until the point where it looked like I should start angling my way up to Austin, at the California-sounding hamlet of Surfside Beach<\/strong>.\u00a0 Despite the name, it looked like just another little Texas town to me.<\/p>\n

The plan was to invest in a Texas state park with shower tonight, and it turned out to be one of the most excellent stops of the whole trip – didn’t see that one coming!<\/p>\n

I’ve been sick the last coupla days.\u00a0 It came on me that Sunday morning at the Visitors Center in Louisiana.\u00a0 Getting sick of course sucks under any circumstances, but getting sick when you are supposed to be having epic fun is just wrong.\u00a0 I’ve mostly powered through it.\u00a0 That’s worked pretty well except for the evil hacking night time cough … can’t power through that sh-t.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I was low-energy when I got to Brazos Bend State Park<\/strong>, but once I popped open the bike and started cruising I went hard at it until well after dark.\u00a0 Unexpectedly to me (80 miles from the coast, in the middle of cattle country), this place was a cornucopia of nature!\u00a0 It had the Brazos River and bunch of small lakes or big ponds, most of which were former oxbows of the river.\u00a0\u00a0 I saw alligators, ibises, egrets, herons of all kinds (Great Blue, White, Little Blue, Yellow-Crowned Night, Black-Crowned Night), osprey, owls, a treeful of cormorants, and a very dramatic evening migration of tens of thousands of black birds … maybe they were blackbirds?\u00a0 Whatever they were, they just kept streaming in from the northwest in an unending river of birds, to spread out in the marsh below my observation tower.\u00a0 The marsh looked deserted at first glance, but at second glance it was teeming with black birds.\u00a0 They were still streaming in when it got too dark to see anymore, and they made a helluva racket!<\/p>\n

In the ponds were flocks of a bird that was new to me – kind of a skinny duck with a big stripe on the side that looked very sporty when they took flight, which was frequently.\u00a0 My book sez they were Black-bellied Whistling ducks<\/strong><\/a>! I’ve spent a lot of time in the duck section of my bird books, and I’ve always seen that name and thought how funny, a whistling duck<\/em>!\u00a0 Anyway, the name fits!\u00a0 They love to fly in little groups from one part of the pond to the other and they all peep and beep and … whistle like crazy while doing so.\u00a0 I wish I could say they were Fulvous Whistling Ducks, because that name is even funnier, but they weren’t.\u00a0 With its long legs, peculiar appearance and odd habits, it’s “most un-duck-like”. Its numbers are increasing in North America<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I had to pedal back in the dark, because as usual, I maximized my quality sunset time<\/em> at the expense of my getting home in the daylight time<\/em>.\u00a0 This time, I was so agog at the beauty and spectacle of the sunset and bird migration from the from the top of the excellent viewing platform that I couldn’t leave.\u00a0 It was all good because the path was straight and pretty smooth and there was enough moonlight to pedal my way back to camp without face-planting.\u00a0 The park bathrooms were being rehabbed, and the temperature was heading into the low 30’s, so I took a cold, uncomfortable shower in the temporary shower truck, had a short but very cold bike ride back to really enjoy the heat in my cozy van.\u00a0 Kinda fun really, but it was counter-productive for getting rid of the hacking night-cough.<\/p>\n

Tuesday<\/h3>\n

Took an AM bike ride to a trail I missed last night, lost my blue beanie, rode back to find my blue beanie, and got back to my site just in time to de-camp right at the 2PM check-out time.\u00a0 Drove three miles to the little lake by the park entrance, where I finally saw my alligator!\u00a0 Not a really big deal to me, I had seen bunches of alligators in Florida, but it is evidently the flagship critter of this park, and they were so insistent in warning me about them (Do Not Enter Water!<\/em>), that I felt a great sense of closure and completion to see one here before I go.<\/p>\n

Then an easy drive through the rolling hills to Kurt’s mom’s house in the burbs of Austen<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My walmart wasn’t much to look at, but it had the most important ingredient, an edge looking out on nature. So I am able to angle the van into a nice view of scrub oaks and grass and pretend I’m … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2010-east-coast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}