2022 Condo Trip, Part Three: Wednesday & Thursday

 This is part three of the trip narrative; you should read them in order. Click on this link to go to the beginning, then click on "Newer Post" to move through to the end.  (And here's a link to all the pictures from the trip.)

We just had to go back to the beach. I got a couple of tacos to go from La Isla, the pretty good Mexican restaurant on the highway near our condo, then we drove down to the National Seashore again. This time we filled up three garbage bags with detritus from the beach, so it felt like we had done some good in the world. Considering how much litter was left behind, not so much....

We stayed out there for a few hours; Nancy and Sherry saw a green turtle in the water near shore, but otherwise it was an uneventful morning. Very relaxing. Jeff stayed behind at the condo for some Me-Time. I spent the whole morning reading the Grey Man novel I've got checked out. (Q.v. Tom Clancy, in Part Four of this post.)

We grabbed sandwiches from Subway for lunch at the condo, then sat around relaxing until late afternoon, when we all put on our bowling shirts and went to the lanes on the grounds of the Naval Air Station. We were the only people in the place, which was kind of nice. Nancy and Sherry bowl about as well as they did when we first started the Once-a-Year Bowling League, but Jeff & I have deteriorated. I used to bowl around 135, year in and year out. The past couple of years, though, I can't even break 100. Now that the arthritis in my knee has gotten to be a problem, it's really hard to get down low enough to release the ball the way I used to. So I've had to change the motion I use for this sport. It helped, a little: in the first game I bowled a 62, but on the second game I got up to 89. Still kind of embarrassing, but not mortifying.

For dinner we went to the little Thai place right by the entrance to our subdivision. The green curry there is as good as what we get back home, but the other dish we got, mixed vegetables with chicken, was a little disappointing, just because the chicken seemed kind of dry. But otherwise, it was a pleasant meal: good service, good prices. And we had plenty of leftovers to bring back for a late-night snack.

Games night at the condo was a version of Canasta called Salsa. I generally avoid playing card games other than solitaire, and now I remember why. Of course, that aversion is easier to exercise when there are foursomes available without my participation.

Thursday, our last day in town, started with a solo trip down to La Isla for some tacos de machacado con huevo a la mexicana and not-bad coffee, then a group excursion to the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and Nature. This is, unfortunately, the time of year when local schools, desperate to keep the kids engaged before summer break, take all their field trips. With the exception implied by that, the museum was interesting enough to occupy a good bit of our day. It had small exhibits on Texas geology; an exhibit focussed on the 1542 wreck of three Spanish ships on Padre Island; local history; and dinosaurs. There may have been other exhibits -- there was quite a lot, I think, of the building that I didn't get to before it was time for lunch, which we had nearby at Brewster Street Ice House, a restaurant and dance hall just beyond the Harbor Bridge's elevated approach ramp. It was pretty well past the lunch rush, so that was good. The food was traditional American -- burgers and such -- and I indulged myself by actually ordering a chicken-fried steak. Usually I think about it, then order something more nutritionally responsible, but this time I followed through, mostly because they bill it as "award-winning." I think it must have been a county-wide competition, at best, but there's really no such thing as bad chicken-fried steak, is there? My dog says there isn't.

Olympic (detail)

Next we went to the Art Museum of South Texas, which is currently free to visit because of some corporate sponsorship or something; I didn't really hear the explanation. I'm tempted to make remarks like "you get what you pay for," but the fact is the exhibits that were open for viewing were interesting. I was particularly taken with a painting called Olympic, depicting a deepwater shipwreck (it felt familiar; I may have seen it last time I was here, hundreds of years ago), and the small collection of Western Art. There's also a visually intriguing 8-foot-tall shard-like sculpture of black-painted bronze that, for some reason, is tucked away in a back room where no one but museum staff will see it unless they're lost.

I call it "the shard"

A lot of the art on display is modern. Call it what you will -- and artsy-fartsy types have names for every type of art, even if their categories seem to include only a single work -- it's basically meaningless crap to me: beach chairs collected into a pair of big balls was okay in a whimsical way; a boat made out of reeds (it looks like) and a "gravity table" were at least mildly interesting for their form. Some of the large canvases were attractive even if devoid of readily discernible meaning. That abstract kind of painting always seems to me to only exist for decoration, not meaning: "We just need a reddish painting to set off the color of the Lazy-Boy." 

There's also a pair of rooms dedicated to Spanish Colonial art. The first room contains paintings from the actual Spanish Colonial period, mostly religious themes. The second contains what I'd call a modern take on it, or Mexican folk-art: bright colored painting of religious themes heavily leaning toward pre-Christian styles. It's not bad, it's just irrelevant to me; kind of like Plains Indian art, language and religion. It's nothing to do with my own culture except by the slightest of impact. If there are aspects of it that truly have meaning, they gradually get absorbed into my cultural heritage, like breakfast tacos or cowboy hats. If not, they remain as exotic affectations. 

Oh, and there's yet another Dale Chihuly assemblage of seaweed-shaped glass, such as can be seen in any wannabe-arty institution with enough money. I really wish he would have a third idea.

Dinner that night was random. I had the leftover curry from the night before; I don't know what anyone else had. 

2022 Condo Trip, Part Two: Monday & Tuesday

This is part two of the trip narrative; you should read them in order. If you haven't read Part One, click on this link.  (And here's a link to all the pictures from the trip.)

 The Laredo Taco Company is the name of a chain of convenience-store taco stands around South Texas. Being something of an aficionado of the taco, I felt no compunction about pooh-poohing the untried quality of their wares. But then a neighbour of mine, seeing one of their locations in passing, reminisced fondly about the old days when she and her colleagues would get lunch there, to go. Having spotted no real taquerías in the immediate vicinity of our condo, I decided this was the time to give it a try.

To my surprise, it was not simply a heat lamp over a supply of ready-made tacos bound in foil, but a Subway-style collection of ingredients with a grill at the ready. I ordered a bacon-and-egg taco on corn, and a potato-and-egg taco, also on corn, with cheese on both. My first hint that this breakfast would confirm my prejudices came when the woman behind the counter looked at me in amazement and said, disbelievingly, "On corn?" I assured her that was what I had said. It provoked an urgent whispered conference with her associate while I went to the register and paid.

I collected my tacos in a brown-paper bag and went back to the condo for breakfast. On unwrapping the tacos, I found that their corn tortillas were the poor-quality dry five-inch circles of masa one gets in plastic pouches at HEB. They are too small for the use to which Laredo Taco Company puts them, so each taco had two tortillas enclosing it. (Double the deficiency.) As concerns the quantity of filling, that is a point in their favour. As for the quality, it was reasonably good. The eggs were cooked very nicely, and they and the additives were plentiful. But wouldn't you think that you could tell the difference, by taste if not appearance, between potatoes and bacon? I could not. And the bag, I found, did not include any kind of salsa, which made for a serious lack. (There probably were salsa options available at the shop, but I didn't notice any.) All in all, a dissatisfying breakfast, but I may try them again in a day or two, with flour tortillas and a search for condiments. At least the service was reasonably good and the price was not outrageous. Besides, if there aren't any other taco options, I'll be desperate.

Having thus fortified myself, I was able to cart this menagerie of people down the road to the beach in the National Seashore, where we spent the rest of the morning. The park service gives out garbage bags at the visitors' center, to encourage users to clean up little patches of beach around them. We took one, and had it full inside of an hour. Next time we'll take more, as there's plenty of trash washed up from Points South along the Padre Island strand. (The park ranger says that's where most of it comes from.) We set up our new beach umbrella (not the one we bought in San Antonio and left sitting in our garage, but the one we bought to replace it) and put out a kind of plastic rug under it, weighted down by sand in the pockets provided for that purpose, and made good use of the water and the beach for the rest of the morning. Nancy even saw a sea turtle -- a smallish one -- in the water. 

We grabbed food to go from Subway and relaxed at our condo for the rest of the day, until dinner at Doc's, a two-storey restaurant that has, at some point in the past fifty years, joined Snoopy's out on the island facing our back deck. Personally, I prefer Doc's to Snoopy's: it offers table service and the margaritas are better. And it offers live music upstairs, which I enjoyed. (I'm often surprised by the fact that so much live music is geared toward people who came of age before Friends debuted.) 

We dragged our sated bellies back to the condo just in time to see the sun sink behind Snoopy's, then turned our attention to the games table. Monday night we cracked open Scattergories, which Nancy & Jeff had never played (and Sherry and I hadn't played in decades), and went through five rounds. Sherry won one round convincingly; she and I drew the rest, or won by no more than a single point.

one of the sea turtles

Our plan for Tuesday was to go first to the State Aquarium, and then the local museum of science and history. We got out to North Beach just before 11 in the morning, and ended up staying at the aquarium until almost five PM. It consists of two main exhibits: the Gulf and the (new) Caribbean halls, plus some exterior exhibits on particular animals: dophins, otters, rays, turtles, etc. 

We saw the dolphin show first. I found myself wondering if those animals, who had all been in the aquarium at least 15 years (one, twice that long) felt any sense of imprisonment, or if they were like dogs, happy to be kept as a pet. (I also wonder why it is that all the trainers -- presumably a position of some glamour in the hierarchy of the aquarium, are female, but let's not go there.) Next, we went to the Turtle Talk, and heard (through an irritatingly static-y headset) about the various rescue turtles in the aquarium. They only keep the ones that are too seriously injured to release into the wild, and have five on hand now. One has air bubbles trapped under her shell and can't descend in the water; another has only one flipper remaining after getting tangled in fishing line. I forget what injuries the others have sustained, but I'm thankful that there's a place where they can at least live out their lives unthreatened.

Nancy and Sherry went to see a film about octopi that afternoon. I was in the Gulf section, watching people in front of the oil-platform exhibit, when I got a text that said "We are going to see the octopus movie. Go through the gift shop." So when they closed the theater doors and the movie started I was in the gift shop, trying to figure out why Nancy considered it a Must-See part of the aquarium. (It definitely isn't.) It sounded afterwards like the octopus movie was a highlight of our visit, though; or at least, was for them & would have been for me.

Dinner Tuesday night was at a little Mexican place just outside the subdivision we're in, a place called Isla. Good service, good prices, way too much food. I thought the seasonings were a little heavy-handed, but nothing really to bitch about, damn it. None of us was able to finish our plates. (We did, though, finish our margaritas....)

We came back to play a few rounds of Hoopla before switching to Scattergories. It almost came to blows when Jeff insisted on credit for his answer to "things that are sticky": A pointed stick. ("Ask Ali, what's stickier than a pointed stick?" I didn't get the reference, but can imagine what it's about. But I still insisted that a pointed stick is NOT "sticky.") In return, he argued against my later answer to "countries that start with O" --  Oesterreich -- but that was just petty revenge: if you don't use the umlaut, it starts with O. (And if you do, it starts with Ö, and isn't that an 'O'?) Anyway, we all got over it and played probably three rounds of the game. Sherry won one round, and we tied once. She was all like "I finally won one," as though it had never happened, like I win all the time. I don't, but she like to feel oppressed. I'm not saying it's her fault, I'm just saying I blame her.