South from Alaska: Crashing the coast in Rockport

Time for new scenery! On Tuesday, we finally escaped from the valley heat and headed north. But not too fast… We’re not ready for cold yet.

We decided a few days in Rockport ought to satisfy our craving for water. We selected Coastal Oaks RV Park to stay in and have enjoyed it. So nice to look out the window and see some trees!
This guy (gal??) was on our car hood at the RV park – pretty cool, huh?

On Wednesday, we walked along the harbor and the jetty, toured the Rockport Center for the Arts and the Texas Maritime Museum, and went to see the wildflowers at the local cemetery. Here are some pictures:

Vance & Jody – is this boat big enough to live on?

There were some neat sculptures near the harbor and art center:

We saw lots of tiny fish jumping near the jetty, but I couldn’t capture them with the camera. Fortunately, these guys were a little slower…

The Texas Maritime Museum was well done and we enjoyed meeting another Alaskan couple there. We keep discovering how small this world really is: the wife was [our daughter-in-law] Jody’s kindergarten teacher!

And, of course, there were flowers everywhere.

And, then to see more flowers, we drove over to the local cemetery because we had heard there were wildflowers there, too. I assume they must mow this cemetery after the spring wildflowers are gone, but who knows?

Here’s an old headstone (you can click on it to enlarge it and read the dates).

Later, we headed back in to town and ate at The Boiling Pot. We chose to eat outside where the waiter covered our table with paper and then dumped our dinner straight onto the paper from a large stew pot: blue crab, shrimp, new red potatoes and small cobs of sweet corn. Makes life simple for the staff: no dishes and no silverware! Fun and different!!

Thursday dawned bright and sunny again, so we headed back down to the harbor to the aquarium and the Bay Education Center.
Aren’t the brown pelicans cool/weird?

Not sure which type of pelican this one is…

And, even though they are annoying sometimes, I still enjoy watching the seagulls!

The Rockport Aquarium was nothing fancy and not very large, but we still enjoyed it. The star of the show there is Marley, the Honeycomb Moray Eel.

And a few other aquatic creatures from the area…

On to the Bay Education Center, where they had beautiful flowers….

…and the most amazing globe! It shows real satellite images of recent weather patterns, but the MOST amazing was…

…this display of – get this! – all the Facebook members around the globe connected by lines! There were no continents or any other world features on this – only the FB members and connecting lines. You could actually pick out the continents by the density of the dots. It was incredible and, for us “senior citizens”, a little frightening!

After the presentation, we couldn’t resist a picture of me holding up the Earth!

We were just getting in the car when this gentleman rode by on a very tall bike! Wonder how he gets on and off…

Then we checked out some of the shops and art galleries in town. One advantage of living in an RV is that we are seldom tempted to buy art or other decorative items – just don’t have room!

Today, Friday, we rented a double kayak and toured the backyards of all the million dollar homes in the Key Allegro subdivision. A few had boats tied to their private docks that were probably worth a million! And, as an added bonus, we got to see dolphins in Little Bay! Fun, fun, fun! Sorry, I didn’t take the camera in the boat so no pictures…

I did, however, take a few of this egret fishing from the dock while waiting for the kayak.