Arrival - finally!

We finally made our destination in South Padre Island. Fortunately, Harvey chose to only mess lightly with the Padres, so there is virtually no noticeable damage here. The day we arrived just happened to be the day that they scheduled their annual Holiday Parade down Padre Island Boulevard. We managed to cob a decent location based on tips from locals.

We ended up with a site that noses Colectiva into the bay, and we are looking straight at the sunset in the evening. Before the Holiday Parade we managed to take in what we hope to be the first of a series of spectacular sunsets.

Our whole arrival weekend was filled with local holiday events to kick off the season, and to welcome the arriving Winter Texans. The vast majority of the population of South Padre Island in the winter are folks from Northern states rather than being Texas residents. We took in the judging of the Holiday Fishing Tournament focused on Redfish.

It was one surprise after another. We learned that the next night was the Holiday Boat Parade with locals decking out their vessels with beautiful light displays. We heard that the Painted Dolphin Restaurant on Jim’s Pier was holding a special parade dinner special, as the Boat Parade would travel right by. It turned out they were fully booked, and out waiting list spot never came through. So we just went over to Jim’s Pier when we thought the parade might pass, and everyone seemed to be leaving, saying the Parade was over. But as luck had it, all the boats simply turned around at the end of Jim’s Pier and passed back by one more time. We caught the entire parade!

We are lucky in that the KOA on Padre Island is taking full advantage of their location. They have two piers just off the RV sites. One pier has charter boats as well as various ocean excursions, such as dolphin watching, dinner cruises, etc. The other has a bar and restaurant where you can grab and adult beverage for a ringside seat on the sunset. It’s a nice feature we plan to take advantage of.

We got here just in time for the Super Moon as well. The Super Moon, or Moon Giant, is a full moon that happens to coincide with the closest distance that the moon reaches in its elliptical orbit around the Earth. It was truly impressive.

We are booked here for 3 months, with Nick and Val, Karen and Albert, visiting us for Christmas – yippee! So I will be signing off until we hit the road again in March, except for any interesting experiences we may come upon while here. The birding isn’t quite as supercharged as we found in Port Aransas in the past, but there is still plenty to look at as we stroll around SPI.

Talk to you soon!