Easter was on the horizon and the luckiest girl in Flour Bluff was making noises about riding and camping over the weekend so, naturally, the leaky rear tire I’ve been trying to nurse a few more miles out of, gave up the ghost. A replacement was ordered with hopes it would be delivered in time for the weekend. It turned out that our girl kid, the lovely and talented Olwen, was able to visit and while she’s put a lot of commuter miles riding two-up on her mom’s Magna, the roomy Valkyrie is her perch for recreational outings.
The new tire arrived Friday afternoon and was mounted on the rim by close-of-business; unfortunately, the tire was mounted backwards. Saturday morning, it was remounted and by Saturday afternoon I’d managed (along with cleaning, greasing and a few false starts) to get it all buttoned back up. In the meantime, Jill and Daughter (with assistance from Granddaughter) had managed to bake a flock of cookies, so it all evened out.
During the afternoon, my longest-time compadre extended an invitation for a coffee break, so we took the Baby Shadow into town to get up with him. He’s not all that good-looking, so I didn’t take his picture, but I did get a shot of his snazzy 1974 custom Sportster.
[Foto 1]
Easter Sunday, we Eastered.
To begin with, Jill and Granddaughter had an Easter egg hunt. I suspect things are a little different at our house than they are at her maternal grandparents’ house.
Afterward, the girls broke confetti-filled eggs, called cascarones, on each other.
Egg-hunting done, it was time to enjoy the local flora.
Daughter, poor child, hasn’t seen salt water in months so, at her request, we “rode the loop”, as we call the route around Corpus Christ Bay.
Once in Port Aransas, we decided to find “Charlie’s Pasture”, an area long favored by locals for fishing and recreating, and newly declared a Nature Preserve.
This is another favored by the birders who come from all over the world to observed birds both migratory and local. On the way to the park area, we spotted this majestic Blue Crane making it’s way down the ship channel.
It’s good the realtors and developers haven’t managed to scrape and pave this area, as they have so much of the island; declaring it a Nature Preserve is one way to keep them from doing so.
To the right is the new pavilion and information center.
There’s some pretty extensive boardwalk built to smooth the paths of visitors and help protect the environment. We took the short route, once around the park, as the saying goes, and moseyed on over to Paradise Pond.
Things were a little slow, as bird watching goes, but the park, itself took me back to a couple of pre-teen years spent in semi-rural Virginia.
I was quite the turtle catcher, in those days and it was a pleasant surprise that we arrive just in time for afternoon bask-along.
Other critters were a little more shy, barely discernible, even with binoculars.
At this point I was beginning to feel that no breakfast I’d had ; after a coffee break we pointed our wheel towards home.
That eve our whole nuclear pod dined at “Doc’s no-gumbo-having seafood restaurant before retiring to the big Bluff.
Life’s good on the Third Coast.
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