I recently went on a beach camping trip with three other capoeira friends of mine.
We all met up at one friend’s house who’d recently bought a truck and saw how much we could safely load up the bed.
She even got all dressed up for our all-female, Texas road trip.
So after loading up the truck bed, we loaded up the car. I sat beside a young woman who wore spiky shorts. That’s a good future strategy for getting enough room on crowded transportation. After securing the tarp, we gassed up and hit the road.
About 4 hours later, we reached North Padre Island.
We arrived at the campsite very excited to get one of these spots.
This is the site we got instead.
I was baffled about how to pitch a tent on asphalt. My friends seemed to think it could work.
One tent was successfully pitched…of course that wasn’t the tent that I was going to sleep in!
I was still trying to figure out my tent, which could sleep 5 people once we got it together.
We staked our tent on the sides and the back to stabilize it.
Of course once the tents were pitched, it was time for a glass of boxed red wine.
Although some people in this world actually prefer white.
As the sun began to set, I started cooking Italian turkey sausage burgers with our nifty propane grill, which I didn’t trust myself to light. I just kept envisioning fire balls.
I “woke up” around 6:20 the next morning, which was a minor miracle since I didn’t think I’d slept at all with the active winds making noise with the tent and car alarms going off. We dutifully reported to the visitors’ center before breakfast.
The last time I witnessed baby turtles being released was in 2004 in Tampico, Mexico.
These turtles reminded me of my students: a few way ahead of the pack, the mediocre masses and a few going the wrong way.
Here’s a close up of one of the stars of the show.
The little turtle star works the crowd before joining the mass exodus.The mass exodus takes an amazingly slow amount of time, but I was pleased to learn that seagulls only pick at the turtles, not eat them.
We watched the turtles trek into the ocean for about 35 minutes.
When we returned from turtle-watching, we put up the canopy and started making breakfast, which for me was 3 types of tamales.
We frolicked down at the beach for a few hours until mother nature convinced us to return to the campsite to put up the rain guards on our tents, chill in the shade and have a drink until the rain stopped.
Five minutes later, we were back in the sun.
I was impressed that at least one of us liked wheat bun sandwiches–with nothing between the buns!
I chose this time to teach one of my friends how to play go. She hadn’t played in 30 years, but through drinking wine, cursing and discussing, I helped jogged her memory. We took a bathroom break and when we returned, our magnetic board had been tidied. The coverstory was that cleaner thought we’d finished our game.
As if we were following a schedule, we returned to the visitors’ center for an afternoon sand-sculpting demo.
Just like the turtle-watching event, we arrived just when things were about to get rolling. The guy showed us how to scoop wet sand into a big pile as high as the base will support.Then he used a set of plastic utensils to sculpt the tower.
With the plastic fork that was missing the middle tines, he added some details to the roof.
Then he started the precursor of the staircase.
He told us when making the windows, we should scoop out the sand instead of jabbing or poking.
Then he cut right angles to make the stairs.
With a clump of wet sand between the two towers, he leveled out a bridge.
As I watched and took lots of pictures, I fantasized of doing some small-scale experiment with my Physics students to do this sand castle building experiment.
Afterwards, it was back to the beach for some capoeira tricks…wave-jumping, boogie boarding and ukelele playing. We passed another boardgame-filled and nearly sleepless night. We packed up camp to head back to Austin on Sunday morning.
We briefly stopped at a tourist shop. Posing in the shark’s mouth was worth the photo op. Of course, I didn’t buy anything.
The tarp suffered a minor rip, but our resourceful former girl scout driver found yet another good use for duc tape and we returned to Austin with dry things and no property loss!