Bill's Blog

North Padre Island

We arrived on North Padre Island on Tuesday, the 11th of March.

The Texas coast is not a secret, but it does not seem to have the notoriety of the Florida and California coast. To be sure, it is a lovely natural place – where overdevelopment has not taken place. Starting about 120 miles north of Corpus Christi, there is a chain of sea islands that stretch all the way into Mexico. The Mexican border is about 120 miles south Corpus Christi. There are just two sea islands between the two: North Padre and South Padre Island. The islands are only slightly developed around the cities of Corpus Christi and Brownsville. Without the development, they are very laid back. You can still drive your car down the beach and with a park permit, camp out. The place is very charming. The people are very kind and friendly.

We had driven from New Orleans to El Campo, TX, on Monday. This part of Texas had rich farmland and large fens. The numerous small oil refineries were the only visible signs of industry. We decided to get off the four-lane highway and travel closer to the coast. It was a great drive. When we got to Aransas Pass, we took one of the little ferry boats to Port Aransas. This is on Mustang Island about 20 miles north of North Padre Island. We drove to the beach and sat for a while, then drove to North Padre Island.

We had arranged to couch surf our first couple of days. We arrived midday, so our host was not able to receive us that early in the day. We spent a good part of the.day looking around Corpus Christi. We drove through the poorest and the richest neighborhoods. Housing for the poor is much worse than you would see in the Midwest. The homes of the rich were mostly built after 1950 and are on the bluff along the south shore of the Corpus Christi Bay. We also looked for and found a number of fairly inexpensive motels that we might have to use after our first couple of days with our couchsurfing host..

We drove back to the island and found a great pub with an ocean view. During happy hour, beers were but a $1.50 each. We met some great people one whom would later prove to be a godsend. We had a couple of beers each and then found our host’s condo. Jennie is a lovely person. She has a nice place and two very cute little dogs. We talked for a couple of hours then headed over to a local eatery on the bay called Snoopy’s. The place had a wonderful atmosphere and good food. We had fish and chips and more beer. We could not have asked for a better place to be.

On Wednesday we spent more than half the day on the beach. The sand is hard packed and very white. We saw birds: sandpipers, pelicans, hawks and more. We saw two or three dolphins feeding along the shoreline. We enjoyed seeing them, but the fishermen working the beach we not so happy. As we walked the beach, the dolphins would occasionally launch themselves high into the air. When I looked out to sea, there were three oil rigs on the horizon. Locals tell us there are hundreds more further out and going out as far as 140 miles. Mid-afternoon we returned to clean up and rest. About 4:30 we were back at the pub with the great view, the Lighthouse. It was there they we got an offer to stay at Larry’s house, which Colin Jones was caretaking. We enjoyed our beers and headed back to Jenny’s condo about 6:30. We were soon at another good local restaurant. After diner I was ready to lay back. I cannot believe how a little beer and wine puts me down for the evening.

Thursday we moved into Larry’s lovely house on the bay. It was just a joy to be there, sitting on the deck. We did not do much the rest of the day. We dropped by the Lighthouse Pub. We did some grocery shopping. We made a great steak dinner.

Friday we took it easy all day. We enjoyed sitting on the deck with its fabulous view of the bay. We saw large fish in the channel. The day was just lovely. In the mid-afternoon we drove to the national park. The dunes are beautiful and the area is so different. The air out to sea was about 20 degrees warmer than the water, so ground fog mist blew off the sea all afternoon. We returned to the Lighthouse. It is really a good pub with a very interesting cast of characters. Colin was there as always. He let us know that we would have to move on tomorrow, as the house was rented for the next week. A pity, it is such a lovely place to be. We bade our goodbyes after a couple of hours of drinking (just two beers each).

We will head inland to San Antonio tomorrow.

View of Bay from Deck of Larry’s House

Eating Our Way across the Delta

This time our story starts in Memphis. We decided to start a tour down the Mississippi River. The difference with this journey is that we would be looking for great hole-in-the-wall cafes, BBQ pits and juke joints. For years I have been listening to Jane and Michael Stern on public radio. They can be heard nearly every week on The Splendid Table, which can be heard on most US public radio stations and on-line. The show’s host, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, has the Sterns on every week. To hear them from last week’s show click here. Jane and Michael travel all over the USA looking for extraordinary little cafes and restaurants. They have published their research in several books; their best known book is Roadfood. You might want to check out their web site, Roadfood.com. So here is our story.

Last Sunday, the day we arrived in Memphis the weather was near perfect. The temperature was nearly 80 and the sun was shinning. The next day was completely different. It was cool and overcast. By midday it was raining and raining a hard, cold rain.
We got a late start and stopped to lunch on our way to the city center. We at a great neighborhood BBQ place on Elvis Presley Boulevard, called A&R Bar-B-Que. We had some great BBQ pork sandwiches, then headed down to Beale Street. Our first stop was the Memphis Rock and Soul Museum.

We were there nearly two hours. Memphis is where Rock and Roll got its start. One of the different things in the museum is the listening device they provide. It is not just to listen to the description of a scene, but it is also to hear the great blues and rock music that originated in Memphis and just a few miles south in the Mississippi Delta. We walked across the street to where the Gibson Guitar Corporation has a small factory and store. We had a look at the guitars but skipped the half-hour factory tour. There were lots of foreigners visiting the factory and the museum. One whom we spent quite a bit of time with was Fabio, a Roman doing a month-long car tour of the USA. Like us he travels quite a bit. He is a prodigious photographer and you can see his photos at www.fotoframmenti.it. We tried to wait out the rain and when that failed we made our way to a bar on Beale Street to imbibe a beer. Then we walked a couple of blocks only to discover that the Rendezvous restaurant was closed on Mondays. By the time we got back to Beale Street, we were soaked. We ate at the Blues City Café on 2nd and Beale Street. The ribs were great. Well-fed, a bit tired and a lot damp, we called it an evening.

It did not feel quite like Memphis on Tuesday morning. It was still raining, then sleeting then snowing for just a minute. I caught the ice and white stuff on the windshield, but it melted as it kissed the earth. By the time we were headed south on US 78 towards Oxford, MS, the precipitation had ended. We had decided to see the fabled university town before heading into the Delta. Oxford was a cute a little town as one might expect. It was clear that this was the place that John Grisham had in is mind when he wrote his book, A Time to Kill. After quick walk around the town square and a cup of coffee. We headed for the Delta.

Our first stop in the Delta was at the cross-roads in Clarksdale. That’s right, the cross-roads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil. We did not stop because of Johnson, but because of Abe’s Bar-B-Q. It was great BBQ pork sandwiches, then back on the road – riding through the delta. The delta is some of the richest farmland in the USA. It is flat and very fertile and gets plenty of rain. At one time five million share-croppers lived in Mississippi and Alabama. Mechanization drove them into the cities of the North and cities like Memphis. Today there are less than one million. We stopped for a snack of hot tamales at the White Front Café in Rosedale. All she makes is tamales. God, they were good. For some reason this Mexican favorite has become a favorite in the Delta, where every restaurant offered them on the menu. By mid afternoon, we were in Greenville, where we stopped for the night. In the evening we made it to the last Roadfood café we would encounter before New Orleans. The name of the place is Doe’s Eat Place. There is a branch of Doe's in Little Rock, and it was a favorite of our past president. But I doubt the one there was like this one. To get into the café, you walked through the kitchen. The decor was pure backwoods. We shared their smallest steak with fries and hot tamales and a beer each. We knew that it would be a bit more expensive than our meals earlier in the day and the day before. But I got a hell of a shock when I got the bill. The steak was 33 bucks. How often do I need to relearn the lesson that I must read the price on the menu before ordering? Still it was the best steak that I had eaten since being in Argentina.

We first travel a few miles to see the Jim Hensen Museum in Leland. As small as it was, it was real cute. They even had a Kermit the Frog that Henson made. He grew up on an agricultural station just a few miles outside of Leland, MS. After the visit we continued onto Vicksburg the same day. We saw the cemetery. We drove through the city on a route that took us by the local sites, including a few antebellum mansions. After seeing Vicksburg, we continued south. We saw the fickle finger of fate on the Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson, made famous by Monty Python as the Church of the Golden Hand. We drove on the Natchez Trace, what a wonderful parkway. In the late afternoon, we arrived in Natchez, Mississippi and settled in for the evening. We ate catfish that night and it was great.

We spent the next morning walking all over Natchez. We saw one antebellum mansion after another. Unfortunately our photos do a poor job of showing how really large they are. Natchez was the wealthiest city in the South prior to the Civil War, it had the most millionaires per capita in the whole US. So rich were they, that they actually opposed succession and the war. Perhaps that is why it was not shelled or burned. They surrendered to Grant with hardly a fight.
After a great lunch of BBQ pork at the Pig-Out Restaurant, we continued south on US Highway 61. When we got to Baton Rouge, we did a small detour to view the governor’s mansion and the old and new capitols of Louisiana. We arrived in New Orleans late in the afternoon. We were couchsurfing it here, but our host would not get home until 8:00 PM. We were in the Garden District and decided to wait in a local tavern. The beer was good, and we played cards. We felt very lucky to have found a place to stay in the Garden District and our host, Adrian, was a really great guy.

Friday was cold and overcast and in the late afternoon it started to rain. Still we made our way downtown to eat at the Bon Ton Café. We had crawfish etouffee and crawfish bisque. The flavors were exquisite. After lunch we walked to the French Quarter. I no longer find Bourbon Street all the exciting. It is a place for the young or a place to drink and experience the Sin City. Royal Street with its dozens of galleries is really great. One gallery featured body art as high art. The artist, Craig Tracy, is world famous for his creations. You have to see it to believe it, which you can do at www.paintedalive.com. We also walked into Jackson Square and across the street for coffee and beignets at Café du Monde. We were freezing by now, so we made our way back to St. Charles to catch the street car into the Garden District. We learned something about New Orleans during our one-hour wait: not everything runs on time or maybe at all in New Orleans.

Saturday was warmer and very sunny. We spent a couple of hours driving around the Garden District. The homes are wonderful, and the massive mansions are even better. This part of New Orleans, the oldest part, saw little damage during hurricane Katrina. We stopped to eat at Domilise’s Po-Boys for a fried oyster and shrimp po-boy. Po-boys are the big sandwiches that New Orleans.is famous for. It was fun to watch makers put them together. We arrived at the little café just before noon. When we got done eating, the customers were lined-up out the door.
In the afternoon we drove through the most devastated neighborhoods. Block after block of homes were just gone. Other nearby homes were abandoned. The further that you got from the levy the more homes were standing, but still more than half were abandoned and rotting. We drove through several other neighborhoods and found that nothing else was even close to the damage along the levy.

Today, Sunday, is our last day here. The clocks were reset last night for daylight-savings-time. In the afternoon we returned to the French Quarter. Stopping at many galleries, like Photo Works, and enjoying all the street music. We walked into the St. Louis Catholic Church. It suffered some wind damage and it lost its organ to hurricane Katrina, but the rest of the church has been beautifully restored. Behind a tiny store front we found something quite unexpected: two rug weavers at their looms at the Louisiana Loom Works. They produce some very beautiful rugs form fabric mill-ends. Because they have such large looms, they make them to order. By the way, the style of rug is often called a rag rug in the Midwest. But these were far better and more beautiful that any rag rug that I have seen coming from a Midwest crafts fair. A few doors down Chartres Street there was another surprise: a yarn shop. The antique shops and galleries, the musicians and fortune-tellers, the bars and the restaurants, even the flee market with its kaleidoscope of god-awful goods were no surprise. They are what I have come to expect in the French Quarter. There was one other surprise: the U.S Park Service has a small museum on Decatur Street. They consider New Orleans a national treasure. They even have park ranger that provides guided tours of the Quarter.
The other thing that struck me is the large number of European and Asian visitors in New Orleans. We saw and heard the voices of Germans, French, Danes and Italians. The weak dollar has brought many to our shores. It is a pity that our South American Brothers, still cannot easily get visas to visit. With the Brazilian Real worth nearly twice what it was four years ago, why can’t they come here more easily? The same can be said for the Chileans and Argentineans.

Tonight we will visit the nearby Café Atchafalya, another of the great recommendations from Roadfood.

As for tomorrow, we still do not know where we are going to Texas.