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.

We went to several more locations to look at birds, beginning with Part Aransas Nature Preserve.

I liked that the plants were identified.

Bob was more interested in the birds.

Yeah, that's an alligator in the grass, snoozing between meals.

I have to admit that Texas does a good job with their parks.

We were getting hungry and looking forward to our Thanksgiving meal. We didn't anticipate having a hard time finding something that was open. The first two restaurants we tried were closed--an oyster bar and a Mexican place. We ended up googling "restaurants in Corpus Christi open on Thanksgiving" and found a short list that included McDonald's, Denny's, Cracker Barrrel, and IHOP. We ended up and the only one that looked a bit more upscale--Landry's Fish House, a restaurant in a double-decker houseboat floating on the water.

Just about the time we went inside (2:00 PM), the wind and rain that we had expected all morning finally hit.

I think it is worth noting what we had for lunch. It was definitely not our usual Thanksgiving. Bob ordered crawfish toast and fried stuffed jalapenos for appetizers.

He had flounder with mushroom and crab topping:

And I had tilapia with shrimp and crab topping.

It wasn't the best Thanksgiving meal we had eaten, but we were stuffed, and so there was at least THAT traditional part of a Thanksgiving meal.

The rain continued unabated, and there was nothing more we could do because of it, so we returned to our hotel and watched the Thanksgiving classic (yeah, right) Back to the Future 3. It was a very unusual and memorable-in-its-own-way Thanksgiving Day.