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!