Mustang Island and Port Aransas

East of Padre Island is Mustang Island and the is where we headed next. Mustang Island is a little more populated and has many condo developments. We also saw a nice RV park where you can buy your spot and put it in a rental pool for when you are not there. It is possible to drive the length of the Island, take a ferry to the mainland and complete a nice circle drive of a little under 100 miles. We did not do this but drove to Port Aransas at the end of the Island, had a nice late lunch / early dinner, and returned the way we had come. Port Aransas has many interesting seafood restaurants. We had to choose only one but think we did pretty good.

The top stickpin is Port Aransas and the bottom one is our RV park.

Padre Island

A visit to Corpus Christi is not complete without a drive to Padre Island. It was a little hazy today with a bit of wind but overall quite pleasant. The road does not follow the beach but sticks to the middle of the Island. It is only after you pay the State Park fee of $10 per vehicle that the road goes over to the beaches. We stopped at the Visitor’s Centre where I bought a Bird Book and headed for the beach. The Laughing Gulls had pretty much taken the place over and were happy to stop and pose for photos:

Here is the beach in front of the Visitor’s Centre, a popular surfing area when the wind is up:

The Unsung

Take a few minutes and watch this video on the early Civil Rights Crusade:

The Unsung Pt.1

And Pt. 2

Thank you, Martin!

They Can’t Take Away Our Dreams

Tomorrow, April 4 is the forty second anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. The Dreamer Is Dead but the Dream lives on.

We can now only dream of what kind of a better world it would be if we had Martin and others for a few more years. They are all dead and gone, taken from us too early, so we can only dream, but I know it would have been a better world! All we have left are the dreams.

People like John and Bobby:

Medgar Evers, Malcolm X:

Harvey Milk, an early participant in the new Civil Rights war:

Waterfront Drive

The nicest way to the main part of town takes us along a very nice stretch of older, grand houses on the water. It is a beautiful area, parts of it reminiscent of “Gone With The Wind”!

Corpus Christi Seafood

There are lots of seafood places here in Corpus Christi. Last night we went to a local waterfront diner that the RV park people recommended. It was very good and the fresh sea breeze helped with the appetite. I had grilled tuna and Norma had the mixed grill with whitefish, oysters and shrimp.

Today we spent the day in the older areas of town. We bought a couple of things and then went for lunch. I had the Shrimp Po’ Boy:

 

And Norma had the Gulf Crab Cakes With Mango Sauce:

Some other choices:

Both were good but hers won the taste competition!

My New Glasses

Every time I get new glasses I go through a period of adjustment while I get used to them. The worst time was when I got my first pair in 2000 just before I retired. At that time both Norma and I had a plan from our employers that each covered 50% of the cost so I got them for nothing. Back then I gave up on them altogether for a while and tried to do without. I got dizzy and sick to the stomach every time I put them on. Driving was almost impossible. Eventually I got used to them and every new pair since has been a slight variation on these feelings.

This time was no different and the morning after I picked them up I was almost ready to cross the border again and take them back. Instead I kept them on and waited out the day. Now they are fine. I think it is because the focus point and splits in the bifocals are in slightly different places and I just have to get used to it.

I like the Transition feature. It is like wearing sunglasses and the change when I walk into or out of the sun is very quick and not noticeable. My sister had a pair some time ago but did not like them because the change was too slow and she was blind for a few seconds when she came indoors. These do not do that so I guess the technology has improved.

The pair I bought in Canada in 2000 were progressive only and cost $750. Two years later I replaced them in Algodones, Mexico for $120! I have bought several more pairs in Mexico and when I was in to see my Canadian Optometrist this summer he asked about them. I told him the price and he said his cost for the frames was more than I paid for the whole thing. He liked the glasses and and said the workmanship was excellent. His only suggestion was to get Transition lenses next time so that is what I did. They were slightly more expensive at $160 USA but the Canadian dollar is almost at par right now so it was a very good deal.

Corpus Christi, Texas

We decided to take a small detour and visit the seaside city of Corpus Christi, Texas. It adds about a hundred miles onto the trip home but is worth it. The seafood here is rumoured to be very good. We checked into the Colonia Del Rey RV Park because it’s ad says it has WIFI at your parking spot. This sounded great and is even sort of true. It does reach our spot but is not free! In fact, it is $4 per day extra. We got a 10% discount in the nightly rate through the Good Sam Club so that almost covers the WIFI.

I immediately went for a hot, steaming shower but found there was no hot water. A maintenance guy told me to try the other showers at the other end of the park and there I found huge, very clean shower rooms with privacy and tons of hot water. Heaven!

Tonight we will venture out to find the waterfront and a seafood restaurant. I will have more to report later.

Computer Problems

I have two computers along on this adventure. One, the new Asus NetBook is mainly for packing around to find WIFI and do email and web surfing on. It works very well and I am very happy with it.

The other is an eight year old eMachines laptop that is quite heavy as laptops go and has a battery that no longer holds a charge. I considered replacing the battery last summer but decided against it. There is also a loose wire in the screen somewhere that caused the screen to go dark once in a while. It can be brought back by opening and closing it a time or two.

The eMachines is where I download all my photos from the camera and have my Quicken Financial Program where I keep track of the family fortune, bank and cash accounts. The data in Quicken goes back ten years. I backup Quicken religiously but sometimes I am not so careful with my photo backups. My backups are all on a fairly new one Terabyte external hard drive. Every time I haul it out Norma complains about “all the wires”.

Yesterday Quicken would not open! It sat at the welcome screen for several minutes and did nothing. I had a backup that was a few days old but I persevered and finally it opened. I immediately did a fresh backup and closed the program. It would not reopen!

I then noticed a screen saying my Avast! Antivirus was not running. I tried to manually start it and was told it could not find a necessary file. EMERGENCY!!!! PANIC!!!!!!!!! HARD DRIVE FAILURE!!!!! I tried System Restore a few times, going back further each time but same problem. No Quicken and no antivirus.

I have Norton Ghost installed and do full backups every once in a while. The last backup was a bit over a month old so I did a full restore from this backup. It worked! Quicken opened and I restored the data backup that I had just done. Avast! Antivirus updated itself and started running perfectly. It found it’s file. All seems fine.

Suddenly I remembered MY PHOTOS! I looked on the backup hard drive and all my photos up to the end of January were there but I had lost all of February’s photos. Damn. I checked the Asus and some of them were there as I had downloaded the camera to that computer every time I wanted to put photos on the Blog so not all was lost.

Needless to say, I am now backing everything up several times a day while I decide what to do. I am thinking of buying a new laptop here in the USA as they are quite a bit cheaper. WalMart carried Dell and I have heard good things about them. I have Windows XP on all the other computers and the new ones come with Windows 7. Will I have compatibility problems with my software? Probably, and I do not want to have to buy new versions of my very expensive software like Quicken, PhotoShop, Office, etc. This would cost much more than a new computer. Well, at least I have time to think about it. Life is not so good today!

Fifty Peso Haircut

While we were waiting for the glasses I found a barber to try to tame my mop of hair. The pleasant barber spoke English and told us about working as an illegal in Texas when he was young. He is now 52 and had been back in Mexico for many years.

He finished my hair and Norma asked him if he knew where she could get hers cut. He told her of several places but at the end told her he used to cut women’s hair and if she was brave he would do hers. She sat down and he cut her hair. She says it was the best cut she ever got!

We asked how much we owed and he told us fifty pesos each, one hundred pesos. We paid him and added a fifty peso tip which he tried to give back. He then told us business is very bad and some days he has no customers at all. More indication of the successful scare tactics.