CORPUS CORPOROSUS

Friday, June 12.    A leisurely drive down to Corpus Christi.  Here, old salt passes even older ship.  We’re here to visit with our friends Perry and Sara from the old FTC days in the 70’s.  As the title of this episode augurs, this was a lip-smacking three days.  Also a lip flapping three days.  I do believe the four of us talked non-stop for the entire awake time we were there.

Sara made a lovely dinner Friday night in her self-designed remodeled kitchen that has more useful storage space than any I have ever seen.  I’m in big trouble when we get home!  Better keep Loni on the road.  Saturday we toured CC, seeing the art museum, the art society’s gallery, downtown CC, and the mansion district along the seafront.  We then went to Rockport, which is turning into a sort of Carmel-by-the-Gulf with art galleries.  It also sported a cafe that specialized in homemade cheesecake.  Hey, lunch solved!  It was eclectically decorated

but the cheesecake was indeed good and in great flavors.  We had maple pecan and a blackberry.  Bring on the Lipitor!  We did some exploring along the coastline

and found a beautiful beach with a kite festival underway.

Then it was on to the Fulton Mansion, a Munsters House lookalike if ever I saw one.  It was closed, so we just

kicked back on the porch and enjoyed the millionaire’s view, which wasn’t shabby at all.

This all is hot work, of course, so we headed across to Padre Island on the ferry

to kill some Margueritas, beer and wine while waiting to digest the cheesecake so we could go to dinner. 

Alcoholic content at the required minimum, we took off for a little place that is a favorite of Sara and Perry, and for good reason.  We lucked into a table just as a party was leaving, and there immediately formed a line after us waiting outside on the patio for seating.  Seafood and seafood pastas was the order of the night, and the place was great.  Grilled shrimp over angel hair pomodoro with plenty of garlic sent me into smacking giggles.  We could only laugh when the server asked about dessert.

Sunday we drove about an hour out of town to visit the famous and huge King Ranch.  This is an impressive place to see, with an Horatio Alger history.  Amazing how fortunes are started by ambitious men who have nothing.  I won’t recite the tale here as you can google it here and read the whole story.  The collection of brands was interesting (the horizontal snakey one, called the “running W” is the King Ranch brand) but I think the most fascinating aspect of the tour was our meeting a cowboy who was born and had lived his entire life on the ranch.  At age 13, he broke and was the first to ride the horse that would become the 1946 Triple Crown winner, Assault.

All this traveling around made us thirsty and hungry, so it was off to dinner and Tex-Mex and beers.  The enchiladas were great! 

This was a great visit with some very good friends and we were reluctant to move on, but we did.  Monday we set out to camp at Padre Island and get in a little surf time.  Further up the Island you can park right on the packed sand, but we opted to avoid the blowing salt water (the wind had blown a steady 15mph the whole time we were there, right off the Gulf) and park at a state park right next to the beach.

The ocean was like bathwater, but it was mighty refreshing in all that humidity.  It slopes out very gradually, so you can be a hundred yards off shore and still standing up.

And it runs for about 14 miles or more up the shore.

Corpus is very nice, indeed.