Day 10: Goose Island State Park, Lamar, TX. Spring forward

In the middle of the night, or, sometime before us clamming up for the night and emerging the next day, we got neighbours. Our Deluxe Premium sight was back to Premium. No worries, we were heading out today.

Morning walk was the opposite of yesterday. I went east on the beach rather than west. In fairness, west was best as there is less vehicular traffic allowed on that section.

Highlight was the large flock of pelicans that flew over.

When I was in high school I really wanted that super cool new wave hairstyle so I went in and asked for the “Flock of…” but they cut me off and said, “yes we know”. So I sat down. Turns out, they weren’t as cool as I was and they thought I wanted the Flock of Pelicans hairdo. It was $35 and not what I wanted. Rather than paying, I ran, I ran so far away.

After walk time we packed up, drained some tanks (still not the ones covered in feces) and hit the road. We had talked about staying a while longer to go on the lazy river for a few more rounds. But it turns out we both might have had a bit too much sun the day before, so the lazy river was ruled out.

We had met this other Canadian couple last night and they raved about Goose Island State Park. He is semi-retired and works remotely and she only works in the summers. They live up in the Muskokas. Obviously totally hate worthy on all fronts but they seemed nice. Oh, they rode their eeee-bikes from Galveston Island State Park over to our “resort” to check it out. Anyway, Mrs Milddogs hopped on the Verizon fuelled internet and found a vacant spot on the waterfront at Goose Island. Boom, it was ours.

Back in 2003 when we first started camping we really liked the Upper Canada Migratory Bird Sanctuary which we nicknamed “Goose poop park”. Perhaps we have come full circle?

Our drive between locations was about 4 hours including a stop at H-E-B (local grocery store chain) to provision. We left heading west on Galveston Island. The Garmin hated the route and wanted to keep turning us around. It was a nice drive along the coast and then mostly 2 lane secondary highways in southern Texas.

Turned out that H-E-B was boiling shrimp and Crawfish so Mrs Milddogs picked up some of those for her lunch. Provisions safely stored we hit the road, bypassing Sonic again and a few smaller Buc-ees.

This campsite is super cool. We are at the edge of the ocean (technically the bay). Just some dirt, and then a small breakwater and then water.

At first we backed in and got level. Mrs Milddogs then kindly pointed out that our sliding door would be exposed to our neighbour’s pavilion and not ours. Out we went, turned around, re-levelled and we were set. But, well, it’s really windy. Like 20 knots windy. Mrs Milddogs enjoyed her shrimp and crawfish in the pavilion while Amy and I watched with very different intentions.

The people next to us are a family of 5, they have a 2 person tent and an SUV. That’s ambitious at the best of times and really ambitious when the tent is half folded over by the wind. I don’t think they are an amber alert situation so I am not asking questions.

We had been told by those hateful Canadians that you could watch dolphins in the bay from the campsites (the waterfront ones) and sure enough we saw a two dolphins swimming about before it got really windy! Thank you dolphins!

On the drive here we saw some pink spoonbills. That was cool.

Before dinner we walked over to the pier. It is long and rather crowded with fishing people. All with their territory staked out and happily flinging their poles around purposefully and perhaps a bit carelessly to the people casually walking by.

Oh wait, I forgot something. In van life circles, like the Travato owner people, it’s cool to post pictures showing your tanks as Full, Full, Empty, Empty (fresh water, propane, gray tank, black tank), but we did one better today and went FFFF.