Correction on Thanksgiving Post

Curt's sister, Patty, who is an avid birder, asked a couple of questions that caused us to take a closer look at the bird we saw "fishing" in the hold of the boat on Thanksgiving Day. Turns out it wasn't a reddish heron. After consulting Peterson's and Sibley's guides, and after looking at our photos more carefully, we've determined that it was actually a juvenile great blue heron. The smaller size and different coloration threw us off, so we figured at first that it wasn't a great blue. That left the reddish egret in our minds. But, as Patty pointed out, this guy really has a heron's head, neck and body. And the one reddish egret that we positively identified on a previous trip to Rockport really was much more shaggy looking, as it shows in the bird guide photos.

Good call, Patty! Thanks for keeping us honest!

Still Finding New Places to Explore

Today after doing some chores around the house, we decided to take a little drive to a part of Rockport we hadn't been to before. Curt noticed on the map that there's a little spit of land at the very south end of Rockport. When we got there, along Shell Ridge Road, we saw some nice homes with beautiful views of the bay. One place had a private bird sanctuary in their large back yard. The only birds we saw out were a large flock of guinea fowl. Apparently they have been fed by people driving by in cars, because as soon as we slowed down to see them, they all came running toward us. Too bad we weren't prepared with our Purina Guinea Chow.

 

Then we went around to the other side of the inlet and found a spot we hadn't seen before. Apparently lots of other people have! It's quite the boating area. There's a wonderful observation area where we got to watch the boaters come and go. 

Out across the water I spotted a pink bird flying. I knew it wasn't gangly enough to be a flamingo, but had no idea what it was. But checking the Peterson Bird Guide on my iPad confirmed that it was a Roseate Spoonbill. Neither Curt nor I had ever seen one before, so we have a new sighting for our life bird lists. We couldn't get a photo because he was so far away and we were watching through binoculars. But here's what Peterson has to say about him. 

 

Later we saw him with another, so there must be a pair out there. What a great thing to see!

This area is definitely the spot for the more expensive boats...sailboats, yachts, and pleasure boats, as opposed to mostly fishing boats docked at our little Fulton Harbor. 

There's an enormous boat storage facility. I never saw anything like that before, but we could see inside with binoculars. They have boats stacked up all the way to the ceiling in there, lifted and lowered by the tallest forklift I've ever seen.

You can barely see the rigging of a large yacht between the two halves of the building. That will give you an idea of the size.

Then we found a little Texas Barbecue stand and shared a wonderful plate of brisket, sausage, beans and cole slaw. What a great find. We love little places that the locals frequent.

This afternoon, Curt hauled out our inflatable kayak and we decided to take it for a spin. So we loaded it on the truck and drove across to the bay, near where our flock of white Pelicans reside.

Here's Curt getting the last bit of things together, just before I tucked he iPad safely in the truck. Not taking that out on the water!

 

We paddled in and around a couple of piers and managed to get in and out without disturbing the Pelicans. Here they are in the distance as we're loaded up to head back home.

And then, just for fun, Curt wanted to paddle around in the pool in front of our cottage before we stowed it back in the carport:

OK, now take a good look at that little cottage. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that we have a big event coming up next weekend. One of the stipulations when we rented the cottage for 6 months was to make it available on December 6 and 7 for hundreds of people to come through. Every year in Rockport-Fulton they have a tour of 8 historic homes decorated for Christmas, with docents in each home to explain a bit about its history. Well, our cottage is on the tour this year. These cottages were built in the late 1940's and early 50's, and many, many people have vacationed in them through the years. Some families have come back every year for decades, and later their children and even grandchildren have come back to Harbor Lights Cottages for their vacations. So they hold a fond place in many hearts. 

Two of the cottages will be on the tour (ours, #14, and also Cottage #1). They'll be decorated much as they might have been in the 1950s, complete with a pink flocked Christmas tree! I can't wait to see what the committee does with it! We're supposed to be out of the house for those two afternoons, but that's no problem. We'll go on the tour and see all the other houses!

Our new friend Phoebe Wilson, whose family members own several of the cottages, is the one who set this all up. It should be an interesting weekend!

So over the next few days we'll try to find places for the last of my stuff and have the place spruced up for all these people to take a trip down Memory Lane. We'll keep you posted on how it goes! 

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

"We've spent most of our time the past two days either on the waterfront or in the kitchen. And both have been very enjoyable!

Yesterday I took the shrimp we bought the previous day at Flowers' Shrimp Shop and made one of our favorite recipes. It's a salad with a very unusual-sounding combination of ingredients, but it's surprisingly delicious. I first had it at the home of a friend who has her own personal chef. And the day I visited, with other friends, to play with a ladies' string sextet, the chef made this salad. The cold ingredients are romaine lettuce, grapefruit, bell peppers, avocado, and mushrooms.

Once you have everything prepped, you lightly sauté shrimp in a little olive oil. They used fajita seasoning, but I use our standby favorite seasoning, Tony Chachere's. 

Toss it all together. The juice from the grapefruit makes up most of the dressing, but I also add a little olive oil and rice vinegar, and just a touch of soy sauce. It's a spectacular looking salad, and it tastes even better, with the cold fresh ingredients and the warm, spicy shrimp.

'Once we plated it up, I added some seasoned sunflower seeds for a little more crunch. Delicious! Don't let the unusual ingredients put you off. You owe it to yourself to try it.

After we digested a bit, we gathered up our fishing gear and decided to try our luck, for the first time. It was quite windy, but it has been for several days. We finally decided that if we waited for the wind to die down, it could be months!

We fished and fished and fished and fished... And the only bite I got was a crab eating the shrimp off my hook. So I shortened the leader a bit to keep from giving him too much of a free dinner. At one point my line felt heavier, and I was so excited...only to reel in a good sized clump of seaweed.

After the wind pushed my line over on a back-cast and caught my chair behind me, I decided to leave the fishing to Curt for a while and I went in search of the dolphins that we've sometimes seen in that little part of the bay. Eureka! I had much better luck at that than at fishing!

How fun that was! I only saw two yesterday, but in the past we've seen 6 or 7 at a time.

Finally I'd had enough fun fishing, so I went back to the house, but Curt tried another place for an hour or so longer. No luck there, either, but he got in a conversation with a fisherman and learned more about it. So of course we'll try again!

Today, Thanksgiving Day, we decided to walk around the harbor before starting dinner. It was even more windy, but not especially cold. We found our own personal flock of White Pelicans, who have set up housekeeping across the street from our cottage. What a treat that is!

The waves were really crashing in to the head wall of our usually quiet bay.

As we strolled by the boats at harbor, we got to watch a reddish egret (left) and a great egret (right) who had staked a claim on one of the boats. They pretty well ignored each other...

Until the reddish egret realized that the fishermen had left some bait down in the hold. Suddenly he was alert and hungry!

He hopped down into the tank and we got to see him get several courses of his free meal for the day. The shrimp he grabbed were HUGE, and he had to work hard to get them down. It was hard to get a photo, because everything was the same color, but if you look real closely just behind and slightly to the left of the yellow float, you can just see his head poking up with a shrimp crosswise in his bill.

We strolled by the bait shop and learned a little more about the types of bait used around here.

And on around to check out the different types of boats...

A patchwork quilt covers the bow end of the mast on this sailboat!

We found a few unusual birds...each cleverly made of a single piece of PVC pipe:

And from the far side of the harbor we could look across and see the roof of our cottage. It's the gray roof just below the American flag in the distance. That kind of shows you how close we are to the water. What a great place to live!

I'll have to cover the rest of the day later. It's getting time for this seacoast dweller to go belowdecks and crawl into her berth. Good night!

A Few "Normal" Days in Rockport-Fulton

Ahhhh.... No traveling this week. Finally we have a chance to see what it's going to be like to live here. We're mostly moved in. Well, I should say that Curt is fully moved in, and has been since about 45 minutes after we arrived. Me? Well, that's another story. Traveling all summer without all my fun creative things left me wanting to be surrounded by the musical and artistic supplies that I've been missing. So, to tell the truth, it's ME who has needed all these trips to the storage unit. And now that we've hauled all my fun toys into the house, we need to find places to put them all. Because we have a big event coming up the first weekend in December. But I'll tell you about that later, probably in the next post.

 

I mentioned a couple of posts ago how close Rockport and Fulton are to each other. And I told you Fulton is a really small town. This sign pretty well sums it up. I saw a Rockport sign that said their population is 8,000-plus. So Fulton's about 1/7 the size of Rockport, I guess. From our house, though, Rockport is just a few blocks away...so we have all the "big city" amenities right at hand...Ha!

We've been watching the Christmas decorations go up around town, but in Fulton it looks like most everything happens right in front of our cottage, in the parking lot that connects the Convention Center (Paws and Taws), the community pier, the community playground, and the harbor. This, folks, is the happenin' place. The big community Christmas tree was assembled right before our eyes yesterday and today. It's quite impressive. I can't wait to see it lit up (which I believe will happen the first weekend in December).

(Poor Dasher looks like he's hung by the neck)

We're getting to like our little snowman out front now... I apologize for the "tacky" comment I made in the last post. He just took a little getting used to. 

So what have we been doing the past few days? When the weather has been nice, we've ridden our 2-wheeled vehicles around town. What fun! I'm so glad to have Piglet down here!

We took our new fishing rods to Tackle Town to have the line wound on them, and we shopped for more fishing gear.. 

Then we picked up bait shrimp as well as shrimp for us to eat at our favorite seafood shop:

Today Li-Ling's daughter, Carissa, was out of school for Thanksgiving, so she weighed out our shrimp.

Carissa is an 8th grader at Rockport Middle School, and she's a delightful young lady who enjoys participating in every sport played at the school.

Check out these shrimp!

Now that we have all our fishing gear AND bait shrimp, we're ready to fish. It was a bit windy today, so we hope to try it out tomorrow. And if we don't have any luck, we can always do what our friends Shirley and Stephen Smith did in Rockport last year. Shirley said, "We fished and fished for hours and caught nothing! So we went home and cooked the bait shrimp and ate them. They were delicious!"

We've found a wonderful produce stand that stocks lots of local and Texas produce. It's only about 6-8 blocks from our cottage.

We're continuing to go to the fitness club most days to work out. We both like the one rowing machine, because it works both upper and lower body while we get our cardio workout in...so we have to take turns. Tonight I took a stretching class which I loved...and will plan to return a couple of nights a week. When I got out of the class, Curt was getting a private table tennis lesson from a man who will be playing in the national championships in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. Pretty sneaky, Curt trying to get lessons so he can beat me. But I weaseled in there and got a lesson as well. Have to keep things even, you know.

We've been cooking all sorts of delicious meals. Now that we have access to the food that was in our freezer, which friends kindly stored for us while we traveled, we're back to our venison and wild hog delicacies (between seafood dishes). It was Axis deer roast today...delicious! 

Yesterday we made homemade sweet potato chips. SO easy! Just sliced them on the thinnest (#1) setting of my Pampered Chef Simple Slicer, tossed them in a little olive oil and salt, and baked them at 250 for a little over an hour. Delicious!

Since we're trying to decide on a church home while we're here, we attended 3 different churches this past Sunday...early service at one, later service at another, and the evening Community Thanksgiving service at yet another with four local pastors participating...so we could meet them as well. We still have a couple more to check out (there are LOTS of churches in this little town!).

Here's a beautiful,wall of crosses at one of the churches we attended:

We had lunch Sunday at one of our favorite lunch spots in town: the Apple Dumpling Deli. They have terrific soups, salads, and sandwiches made with homemade bread. 

Then we went to check out the remodeling job on another spot where we've eaten a couple of times. We haven't gone there often because it's had a pretty heavy cigarette smoke smell in the past. The new paint job has covered up a lot of the smell (for now). But the view of the bay out back is the same wonderful scene as before:

 I'm happy to report that the remodel job is better than their spelling and grammar:

Hard to imagine that somebody didn't catch those errors...and it's that way on both sides of the sign!

Every time we drive around the area, the light on the water is different, as is the texture.  I don't think we'll ever get tired of all the variations of the view:

How about these white Pelicans?

From our little part of the Texas Coast, we wish you a blessed Thanksgiving. We are certainly counting our blessings this year...we're right where we've dreamed about being for years!