TEXAS AND LOUISIANA: CATTAIL MARSH WETLAND, PINTAIL WILDLIFE DRIVE, SABINE NWR, AND PEVETO WOODS SANCTUARY

November 22-23, 2021

Southern Texas is supposed to be one of the country's best places to birdwatch, and I think that is one of the primary reasons Bob wanted to go there. During the Covid pandemic, he has developed a pretty intense birding hobby, which has included upgrading his camera. I can understand that he wants to use his new toy!

In a two-day period in Southern Texas, we visited four wildlife areas, and I'm going to include all four in one post, partly because they have a lot of similarities. We did visit more wildlife areas later in the trip, but they were in a different region and have a different look.

Our first stop, Cattail Marsh Wetlands, was just outside Beaumont, The City of Surprises.

There is a large viewing station that looks over 900 acres of marshes.

A lot of strategically placed information boards help visitors identify what they are seeing.

I've always connected alligators with Louisiana and not so much with Texas, but they are everywhere (and Beaumont isn't actually that far from Louisiana anyway).

SOUTHERN TEXAS, BEAUMONT: THE ART MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN TEXAS

 November 22, 2021

In my last post, I mentioned what a surprise it was to discover a church as beautiful as St. Anthony's Cathedral Basilica in an industrial town like Beaumont, Texas. Some of the primary businesses associated with the town are Bethlehem Steel, Gulf Oil, and Exxon Oil. Driving around, we definitely got the feel that it was a blue-collar town, stereotypically not a place known for things like art museums.

So as we pulled up to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, I must confess that my expectations were not very high, in spite of the fact that we'd just been blown away by St. Anthony's. The exterior is nice but not exceptional. A statue of a rakish George O'Brien Millard, a prominent Beaumont citizen in the early 1900s who helped develop the city's public school system, stands on the corner.

We stopped at the front desk to pay our $8 admission fees and I was almost immediately hooked. This was going to be Beaumont Shocker #2. Right next to the desk was an elaborate Tree of Life sculpture that rivals just about any similarly-themed sculpture I've seen.

Tree of Life, Creation (1960-1980) by Alfonso Soteno

A close-up view of the top shows God the Creator overseeing his creations, including Adam and Eve in the Garden with the serpent between them.

At the bottom of the tree are Adam and Eve again as they are being expelled from the Garden.

SOUTHERN TEXAS, BEAUMONT: ST. ANTHONY'S CATHEDRAL BASILICA

November 22, 2021

For the first time, the college where I work gave us the entire week of Thanksgiving off. Bob and I just couldn't pass up that opportunity. We started planning a trip to Nashville, but then Covid numbers in that area started looking bad, and most of the places we wanted to go were inside. Where could we go that was less crowded and had more outdoor attractions? 

Why, Texas, of course! After all, we had never been to the Texas Gulf Coast!!

To say I wasn't very excited about our new plan was an understatement. Bob booking a flight that left at 6:05 AM from Palm Springs didn't do much to increase my excitement. I got up at 2:30 AM and we left for the airport at 3:30.

Our flight was uneventful and we arrived in Houston around 11:00 Central Time, picked up a Mitsubishi rental car at Budget, and got on our way.

We headed for the lovely town of Beaumont, Texas, which turned out to be full of surprises. But then, just about every place we have ever traveled to has been full of surprises of some kind.

The first surprise was so wonderful that I'm going to give it its own post. St. Anthony's Cathedral Basilica has to be one of the most beautiful churches we've seen in Texas, and maybe even in the United States.

The exterior was being spray-washed when we visited.