Despite our fun of the afternoon, Chelsea and I were both whupped. We were too tired to cook dinner for ourselves, and too tired to take a shower (the showers at campgrounds are not normally too enticing, and this place is no different), and the heat was still in the high nineties at 7:30 at night. We felt like just crawling into the tent, when our next-door neighbors came and invited us to eat with them.
Our neighbors were three guys, one in his seventies (Bob) and two in their fifties (Kent and Ernie). Kent and Ernie have a home repair business in Austin, and they’d taken three days off to relax and go fishing.
Bob seemed to be ill, as he slept almost the entire time they were here; Ernie was the quiet one, who appeared to be very thoughtful and who read extensively; Kent was the talker, starting in with his beer early in the morning, often repeating himself again and again.
They had hamburgers on the grill, but somehow I ended up being responsible for the grilling. I was very glad I’ve had a lot of experience, though nothing in the last many, many years. It was a quiet meal, with Kent doing most of the talking, but that was totally okay with us! We offered to help clean up, but they refused our offer, so we finally crawled off to bed, with an offer for breakfast in the morning.
A wonderful cool shower (I’ll admit it was disconcerting to shower in a cloud of mosquitoes) and a hot breakfast of bacon, eggs, biscuits, and hash browns with our neighbors sure started off our day right! Our neighbors left by noon; we started missing them right away.
All I can do is claim exhaustion, but Chelsea and I ended up sitting at our table the entire day, just enduring the heat. We’d wakened to a massive invasion of ants in my trailer; it took several hours to clean it all up. It was far too hot to think of riding anywhere, and we didn’t even have the energy to go out on the boardwalk and observation pavilion at the campground.
We’d been watching our neighbors on the other side set up a huge tent the day before, and Saturday they moved the tent. It looked so fun to have a tent that big, that when they walked by us (it looked like two brothers) we commented on how great their tent was. They smiled and went on.
A few hours later, the “older brother” appeared at our site with two cold bottles of Gatorade and two plates of food with the explanation, “I knew you’d say no if I asked, so I didn’t ask you.” They’d made us a lunch plate of grilled pork chops, macaroni salad, and grilled toast!
Later that afternoon we had a chance to talk to the two “brothers” only to find out that they are father and son, Jose and Jose (known as Junior). Originally from Puerto Rico, Jose lives and works in Jacksonville FL as a roofer. He says that he gives his all to his company all year long, working any hours they ask and doing any jobs they ask.
Every May or June however, a relative gets sick, so he takes a month off. According to Jose, nearly all his relatives have been sick so far over the last five years, and a couple of them have died. We really laughed…
We loved talking to Jose and Junior – they are funny and lively and very entertaining.
Jose and Junior took care of us the rest of the time they were here. Saturday afternoon they slipped behind our tarp shelter and handed us cold fruit cocktail. Sunday morning when we returned from a walk around the boardwalk and the observation tower, they showed up with turkey and ham sandwiches with Cheez-its. And then on Sunday afternoon, when we discovered the air-conditioned recreation room, they made us hot dogs and handed out chocolate chip cookies.
We spent many hours together in the rec room on Sunday, and enjoyed every bit of our time with them. The campsite seemed so empty without them!
When we left the rec room last night, not looking forward to more ramen for dinner, we saw that the big picnic celebrations had wound down, and only our closest neighbors were still there. The dad came over and talked to us, and guess what? He invited us to dinner. We read quietly till dinner was ready, then we had our first meal with a big Mexican family.
The campground here is quite nice. It feels very safe, and the crowd here is very pleasant. The bathrooms are okay – not wonderful, but we’ve seen far worse in our time. Each campsite has a small covered pavilion with a picnic table, and we’ve got a great view of Lavaca Bay from the sites.
The rec room is very pleasant, with cooking facilities, laundry facilities, paperbacks, jigsaw puzzles, and a TV, along with lots of tables and chairs. We’ve spent all day here today, writing furiously to get caught up again on blogs and photos.
The campground is empty now except for the regulars. We’ve spent a few days here, both needing a break and hoping that the heat wave breaks. It’s not going to, so we’re headed out tomorrow for Rockport TX. It’s over fifty miles away, so we don’t think we can make it, even if we start at six a.m., because the heat index will be at 101 degrees by noon.
It’s 6:40 p.m. and the heat index right now is 98 degrees. It’ll be a long hot night! We still have to get the blogs uploaded and get ready for tomorrow, so I’ll finish for now. I’ve been writing for nearly nine hours just to get caught up, because we get no writing or photos done when we travel in this heat. My shoulders are killing me – I need to stretch and get out of this hard chair!
We are looking for a solution to traveling in this heat, because we aren’t willing to go through this for another month. We don’t mind the riding – we quite like it – but we do mind feeling so ill from the heat. If y’all have any ideas, let us know!
Signing off from Port Lavaca TX