Port Aransas, Texas.

14th Jan – 21st Jan 2022

Forty minutes drive from Corpus Christi brought us to Port Aransas, a fishing and vacation town on Mustang Island. The Island is one of the many, long, thin, low-lying barrier islands along the Gulf Coast with an endless white sandy beach on the ocean-side and marshland and shipping channels on the land-side. This whole coast is vunerable to the destructive power of hurricanes. The town took a direct hit from hurricane Harvey in August 2017 and suffered devastating damage due to 130mph winds and 6ft storm surges. Luckily the town’s 3400 residents had been evacuated so there were no deaths reported, but 100% of the town’s businesses and 85% of the homes reported damage. Now, four and a half years later it is mostly rebuilt. Only a few empty lots remain and many new developments have popped up too. All the new homes make the place feel very tidy and kempt and every property has a jolly, colourful, pastel paint job. Most homes are built atop stout stilts, acknowledging that flooding and storm surges are a fact of life here but if they insist on dragging oil out of the ground and burning it willy-nilly, they are going to need taller stilts…

We had booked a whole week on a small beachfront campsite here to include the celebration of Nick’s birthday. There was some good weather forecast and we were looking forward to doing some exploring, eating out, and having some beach time. In this town the beach golf buggy is the preferred method of transport and Nick had chosen a day’s rental of such a machine as his birthday present. The golf carts are permitted on all the roads except the main highway up to the limit of Port Aransas town, and that includes the beach which is also a designated roadway. Although we were staying a couple of miles from town there was an hourly shuttle bus that stopped at the entrance to the park and charged a massive 25c each per journey, and it was also an easy, safe cycle. The camp was quite small and compact but we had a nice end-of-row site with a view of the sea through the dunes. It seemed quite a friendly park with lots of long term snowbirds who all seemed to know each other. I think it would have been a more social for us here but we heard mid-week that Covid was rampaging through the residents, having been imported by some visiting grandchildren and then distributed via some jolly potluck lunches in the following days. We did have one conversation with our neighbour early in the week regarding the shuttle bus. We had sussed it out and taken our first trip within 24 hours of arriving in town. He had spent 6 months living at this camp and didn’t even know that it existed. No radar for public transport at all.

Port Aransas, or Port A as it is known locally, is quite an interesting little place. It has escaped much of the modern, corporate, blanket development that erodes much of the character of tourist destinations, thus removing the attractiveness of them as tourist destinations. There are obviously a large number of holiday homes and condos here, but it has mostly retained the feeling of a small coastal fishing town. It was quite sleepy during our stay here but it was far preferable to experience it in low season rather than during the madness of peak season. Given the number of golf carts parked outside rental outlets it must be absolute mayhem here when they are all rented out and being driven around after multiple marguaritas.

Things to love about Port A:

An epic beach. It is long, flat, wide, hard-packed and clean. Cars and golf carts can use it as a road but it is well demarkated with bollards, protecting huge swathes of it from the traffic. It is perfectly legal to park-up and camp on the beach, in RVs or tents and you can have a fire at any time of year as long as it is less than 3x3ft in diameter. There were beach showers every half mile, port-a-loos every quarter mile, bins everywhere and there were numbered markers every 200 metres to help navigate the locations of roads, homes and business behind the low dunes. We sat on it, walked it, cycled it and golf-carted it.

Seafood. Lots of it and very fresh and delicious. We had a couple of meals out in which shrimp and tuna featured heavily. For Nick’s birthday meal we walked to a nearby restaurant that was about half a mile away. It was located near the local airfield across the main highway and as we walked up to the door the hostess asked us if we had arrived by plane….because she had just seen one land….and that was, to her, a more logical explanation for us arriving at the restaurant on foot rather than just having walked from somewhere else. It will never cease to amaze me that in most of this country walking is considered a form of exercise, not a form transport.

Big ships. Port A sits at the northern tip of Mustang Island, beyond which is the shipping channel for the entrance to the port of Corpus Christi. There is a public park at the point and here one can sit and watch massive tankers and tug-powered barges cruise past. A great way to kill an hour or two. Enhanced entirely by the addition of frolicking dophins riding bow-waves and pelicans cruising around looking cool.

Sunsets at the marina when you arrive at the bar at exactly the right time to get the full benefit of the warm setting sun radiating into the open-sided, waterfront building so you can have a couple of pre-dinner beers in the sea breeze and pretend you might be closer to the tropics than you actually are.

Golf carts. Everywhere. And a great toy for a 51 year old birthday boy. Having picked the warmest day, done half an hour worth of paper work and paid the same money as we would have done to rent an SUV, we were the proud guardians of our own for 24 hours. It was slow but steady with its one whole cyclinder, cammoflaged, had neon down-lights as well as headlights and was bluetooth connectable to our music. We razzed around like hoons-sedately-all day, going here, there and everywhere. We did some food shopping, went to the local wetlands bird sanctuary, went to look at boats again, went to the breakwater at the end of the beach, ‘raced’ up the beach, explored back streets, did some nosing at houses, went out to dinner, drove back down the beach in the dark via a beach bar and got it back safely the next day having used $5 worth of fuel. What a marvellous birthday present!

The weather in January for half of the time. 50% of days here were T-shirt, shorts and flip-flop days. The other 50% were jeans, boots, jumpers and coats days. Can’t complain, most of the rest of the US seems to be dealing with winter storms, blizzards and sub-zero temperatures and the UK can’t reliably deliver T-shirt and shorts days 50% of the time in July.

We really enjoyed our week in Port A and were a bit sad to leave. It was great to have slowed down and not been moving so often. Now we have reached the Gulf we plan to travel more like this and spend longer in each place that we stay. Next stop- Palacios.