Mud blobs

2004-06-22 - 8:00 p.m.

Today my parents and I went to Sea Rim State Park, which is on the Gulf of Mexico in Texas right next to the Louisiana border. It was hot, but luckily there was also a breeze blowing which kept us cooled off enough. It's amazing how gross the beach is at the Gulf of Mexico there. The water is a thick muddy brown and the beach is too. But this park also had some marshland in it and it had a very nice 3/4-mile boardwalk loop built in it that we walked around. Here's a picture just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

So the point of this boardwalk thing is that by walking on it we can get out into the marsh and see the wildlife. It worked. I saw two 5-foot alligators today. Maybe for you guys that isn't a big deal, but I've never seen an alligator in the wild before (not counting roadkill) so this was really cool to me. And of course I took pictures of them. Here's the first alligator I saw:

And here's the second one:

After walking around this park for several hours, we drove over to another state park for a look around. This was another one of those historical marker things that I couldn't care less about but my dad was really impressed with it. It had something to do with some confederate soldiers preventing some union soldiers from landing their boats there. Now the spot where that happened is built up into a nice picnic and fishing and boat launch area. So while my dad was reading all the historical signs, I was off playing with my camera. Here's a picture I took looking through a blue lamp near the boat launch. If you turn your monitor upside-down you can see what the area around the park looked like:

After going to a nearby town to eat lunch, we drove back down the coast to the end of the Bolivar Peninsula where we took the free ferry across to Galveston and then drove back up to Houston.