Sea Rim Ice Day

We didn’t arrive at Sea Rim State Park south of Port Arthur, Texas, until 5:30 pm on a Monday evening. The park ranger was just leaving for the day, but she stopped to tell us to take a campsite and pay at the office in the morning at 8:30. There were several of the 15 camp sites still available. We snagged one and had just enough daylight for a walk. Texas allows dogs on beaches and a walk on this wide flat beach was just what Nina had in mind.

And here’s an entry from my journal two days later, Wednesday morning:

“What is the matter with this weather? We’re parked 100 yards from the Gulf at Sea Rim State Park in eastern Texas and this morning the outdoor temperature is 20 degrees!! WTH? Yesterday we hunkered down in the Siesta for the day while the wind rocked our ship, gusting to 28 mph. The temperature fell throughout the day, from 47 degrees in the morning to 32 which is when the intermittent rain turned to sleet and covered the side of the Mini with ice. A winter storm in Texas!! It was an inside recess kind of day.  We read, I put together a blog post, made lentil soup, and we watched the weather on TV. In the afternoon, I tried walking on the park’s nature trail – a boardwalk that runs through the Gulf’s back water.  On a calm day I bet there’s all kinds of waterfowl hanging out in the marsh, but today, after the ½ mile walk over to the boardwalk in the nasty cold 32-degree wind, I wasn’t all that disappointed that the boardwalk was too icy to venture across. Schools are still closed today, and advisories were out last night to stay off the roads.”

Well, we did leave later Wednesday, around noon. Our next stop was going to be Galveston Island southeast of Houston. According to Google maps there were still ramp and road closures in the Houston area, however, the coastal road, Hwy 87, which would take us to the Texas Dept. of Transportation ferry from Part Bolivar on the Bolivar Peninsula to Galveston Island looked open and “red free.” That’s what we did. In a little more than 2 hours we were checking into a camp site at Galveston State Park.

Before leaving Sea Rim, though, we drove just up the road to McFadden National Wildlife Refuge, a paved road running around Clam Lake with coastal marshland on one side and the lake on the other. Oh, the egrets and herons and ducks and cormorants, the coots, white ibis and white-faced ibises, plus ospreys and two roseate spoonbills, all hiding out in the reeds out of the cold wind.  There were a few patches of ice on the road and some of the small back water inlets were skinned with ice. What a lovely way to spend a cold morning as the temperature began climbing up to 40 in the bright sunshine.