After saying goodbye to family and Sand Pond, we headed west once again. In no particular hurry, but also having nothing nearby that we wanted to do, we drove. The rest of the panhandle, across that tiny bit of Alabama and on into Louisiana. We parked for the night in a Walmart on the outskirts of Baton Rouge and loaded up on Thin Wheat crackers at the Dollar Tree across the way.
Then back on the road, heading toward a beach once again. One more chance at spending time on the gulf, this time on the Texas shore. We made our way down to the Bolivar peninsula, just northeast of Galveston. It was a skinny peninsula that had one small town, a fair number of houses (again on stilts), and lots of beach. We were able to drive right onto the beach on hard packed sand and found a nice spot a ways down. It was windy, humid, and the waves were pretty brown as the sand was churned up. It was a Saturday night, so we saw quite a few people and vehicles, some sporting quite large Trump and Don’t Tread on Me flags. Mike did his good deed of the days picking up quite the number of bags of trash in our area and I did mine, ferrying a woman down the beach to a wedding when her golf cart died.
The wind increased overnight and patchy rain started in the morning so I got up to pack away the things that we had left out in the night. I recovered our sandals, but our fabulous rug was lost to the wind. We could certainly see why there was so much garbage to pick up on the beach. Things get away from you very quickly and it was quite possible that some of the garbage made its way across the Gulf from Florida. Our rug probably didn’t make it that far, but still ended up where we couldn’t find it.
We spent a cozy day in the trailer and decided that our beach days were done for a while. We would start making our way across Texas the next day.
The morning found us packing up fairly early and heading to the ferry that would take us over to Galveston. Woohoo! Scarlet’s first ferry ride! Luckily, this one was free as Scarlet is just too expensive to take on other ferries.
We stopped a couple of times for parts we needed for projects and often for gas. The goal was Junction, Texas for a few days at a city park and hopefully a decent cell signal so Mike could work easily from the trailer.
Junction provided us with a very nice free place to stay for Mike’s work days. Junction itself seemed to be a dying smallish town, but it had what we needed. The park was fine with a view of the river, I was able to hit up the grocery store and Dollar Tree and we had some fabulous barbeque.
There really is brisket and pulled pork hiding under the pickles and jalapenos!
