February 13,, 2020
South Padre Island, Texas
Before we cross the pond this evening for a very different phase of our 2020 winter travels, I must post one more piece about Texas. After Bruce and I finished up at the Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen last Friday, we took advantage of the fact that we had a rental car - not our usual frugal style of travel - and took off for South Padre Island for a couple of nights. We would have to relinquish the car on Sunday evening.
SPI, as it's known in those parts, is only about 80 miles away from our rental in McAllen and 20 miles from Matamoros, where the asylum seekers are huddled in an encampment. What a world apart! As a long, skinny barrier island on the very southern Gulf coast of Texas, it's a beach resort, kind of a cross between South Beach in Miami and Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Lots of tall & short condos, none with the art deco charm of South Beach. Lots of stores selling beach towels and straw hats, all looking more upscale than our little OOB. The beach is lovely, long, and clean, and in that way it's similar to Old Orchard.
Besides the beach, SPI is known for its birds, due to its place on the migration route. Thousands of birds stop there to rest and to eat from the banquet of food available to them in the surrounding marshland. We took a fascinating tour at the SPI Birding and Wildlife Center. Among the abundance of birds that we spotted, with the help of our guide, were a trio of roseate spoonbills, as well as brown pelicans. So exotic.
Laguna and Big Padre
In the sanctuary area at the Wildlife Center, we also got to see Big Padre and Laguna, two huge alligators that live there. They had been buried in mud for days but on this sunny day were out getting their batteries recharged. We were told that Big Padre, on the right, is 50 years old, which means that he must have hatched the year that Bruce & I got married! He also weighs 800 pounds! Because he's in captivity with no predators, he may live to be 100. He and Laguna are there because they became "nuisance" animals, ie they lost their natural fear of people. This happens after being fed by people (duh!) or finding food near humans. They aren't necessarily looking to eat us but ... who's going to take a chance? In an adjoining area, there were scores of smaller alligators, all nuisance animals, picked up after becoming too chummy with homo sapiens.
Each time that we walked the beach, the wind was blowing a gale. A red flag at all the entrances warned against trying to swim (too cold, in any case, for us). The wind, the sea, the wide open space, the innocence of the natural world were just the tonics that we needed after the sad situations that we had been immersed in for the previous two weeks.
Now we're back in Boston, waiting momentarily to board a flight for London. We'll spend the rest of the winter roaming around Europe, waiting for snow to disappear from Burnham Road.
More blog posts to follow as we go from London to Madrid to Andulacia, then France & Germany.
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