TEXAS: CORPUS CHRISTI AREA, PART I (THANKSGIVING DAY, PADRE ISLAND, PORT ARANSAS NATIONAL PRESERVE)

 Thursday, November 25, 2021 (Thanksgiving Day)

It's hard for me to be away from home, family, and friends on a holiday, although it doesn't seem to bother Bob at all. It was especially strange to be the Gulf Coast for Thanksgiving. NOTHING about the Gulf Coast says Thanksgiving to me. We didn't even see wild turkeys there.

We left Houston at 6:30 PM on Wednesday night, heading for the Corpus Christi area, a distance of just over 200 miles. Bob was worried that we would hit Thanksgiving traffic, and rain seemed to be imminent, so his anxiety was high. 

But neither heavy traffic nor rain materialized, and we made good time.

In the morning we drove to North Padre Island, a barrier island along the coast.

The road took us right onto the beach, where we drove on the sand along the shoreline. The rising sun broke through the clouds, giving us a pretty start to our day of thanksgiving.

We saw lots of pelicans, egrets, and other seabirds hanging out on the shore.

TEXAS: HOUSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, PART III (KINDER BUILDING - 20th CENTURY ART)

 November 24, 2021

I've never done THREE posts on a single museum, but this museum is really a museum network of seven museums. Had we spent another day in Houston, I would have visited another museum in the network.

After finishing our tour through the first of the Houston MFA buildings, we decided to cross the street to check out a beautiful church we had admired on our way to our parking spot. It turned out to be St. Paul's United Methodist Church, built in the 1930s, and it also turned out to be locked. 

Before heading in to the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, a relatively new addition to the Houston MFA, we took a quick walk through the sculpture garden.  The one piece that looked the most interesting, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Column, was pretty much un-seeable. 

TEXAS: HOUSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, PART II (PERMANENT COLLECTION)

November 24, 2021

As mentioned in my previous post, the Texas Museum of Fine Arts is one of the largest art museums in the United States and has a permanent collection of over 70,000 pieces.  I took a photo of each one for this post.

Not really. 

I'll bet you are relieved.

Actually, I only took photos of 7,000 of my favorite pieces. Prepare yourself.

I was stunned, stunned, to see that the artist behind this painting is John Singer Sargent. It's so abstract and scenic.

Gondolas off the Doge's Palace, Venice (c. 1903-4)
by John Singer Sargent

These are the kinds of paintings that I am used to seeing by Sargent:

Young Man in Reverie (1878) by John Singer Sargent

Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears (1899)
by Sargent, known for his
skill at painting white.

Paintings by Sargent always stand out to me. He does such a good job of capturing the personality of his subjects.

TEXAS: HOUSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, PART I, CALDER-PICASSO SPECIAL EXHIBIT

 November 24, 2022

After several days in the wilds of the Gulf Coast (It's a whole different country down there, but then, Texas has about eight different countries within its borders), it was time for the wilds of Houston.

We spent a brief amount of time in Houston in 2012, and for some reason I didn't have a very favorable impression. I did a 180 on this visit.  I loved Houston. I suppose that's why it is a good idea to visit a place more than once.

It helps that our first destination was the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, one of the largest art museums in the United States, and with 300,000 square feet, it is the 12th largest in the world by gallery space. The permanent collection includes roughly 70,000 works from six continents. 

We were very fortunate to catch the "Calder-Picasso Special Exhibit" while we were there. A touring exhibit created by the artists' grandsons, it highlights Calder's and Picasso's artistic affinities as well as their actual physical encounters with each other. 

Portrait of sculptor Alexander Calder January 3, 1957 by Arnold Newman
Portrait of artist Pablo Picasso on June 2, 1954 by Arnold Newman

TEXAS: PORT ARTHUR MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST

 November 24, 2021

Ninety miles east of Houston is the town of Port Arthur, population 54,000 and home to the largest oil refinery in the United States. Oil refineries dominate the horizon.

Our destination was the Museum of the Gulf Coast, which specializes in just what its name implies--the history of the Gulf Coast.

I stopped to say hello to their welcoming mascot.

Nope, no cavities.

LOUISIANA: FIVE HURRICANES AND THE DESTRUCTION OF CAMERON

 November 23, 2021 

In our travels from one birding spot to another, we drove south from Lake Charles, Louisiana to Cameron, Louisiana, about 50 miles. The area we drove through didn't really have any population centers, just small towns, but we began to see a trend: houses on stilts with not a lot around them.

In Southern California we have almost no houses with basements. In this part of Louisiana, they have almost no houses with ground floors. That area under the house does make a great place to park your car.

We figured that the area must be prone to flooding from the nearby Gulf of Mexico.

Many of the houses looked recently painted and/or remodeled, with new, unpainted wooden stairs leading to the front door.

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).