A trip to Texas and meeting Brenda
OK, I finally got the pictures loaded onto photobucket, so here goes:
the first surprise was when we picked up the rental car. They didn't have the midsize model we'd reserved so we got stuck with this:
Yeah, I know how badly you feel for me, LOL.
It was below zero in Michigan, so I was pleased to see the beach:
Of course, I had to get into the water first thing, it was much warmer than Lake Michigan in June!
I shared the beach with fishermen, birds and jellyfish:
Makayla had already warned me to stay away from sharks and stingrays, they "are not nice". (grin) Still, we went fishing and caught a stingray, which the crew released:
We caught whiting, eels, crabs, stingrays, catfish, ocean perch. The whiting was kept, everything else thrown back except the ocean perch, which the crew fed to these guys. They are an endangered species, the brown pelican:
We both caught fish:
and we outran the pirates, LOL:
We took it back to the room and cooked it in our $7 pan from the Dollar Store, LOL. I made a fresh mango and black bean salsa to go with it:
We bought oranges and grapefruit from a nice Hispanic man selling fruit from the back of his truck. The oranges were nice and juicy, but the grapefruit was amazing, they were huge and nearly purple and didn't need any sweetener at all. We ate citrus and seafood every single day!
We had shrimp a couple of times, and made fish tacos out of the leftover whiting one day. The food in the island restaurants was mostly batter dipped and deep fried, nothing to brag about except one small diner where we had carne guisada with beans and rice:
This sign pretty much said it all:
we bought seafood here, the combination bait shop and seafood market, which I got a big charge out of:
My favorite, I think, was the Texas BBQ in Los Fresnos. The menu was on the side of the building, nowhere else:
For $5.99 they sold me a HALF POUND of BBQ'd brisket with beans and rice, it was nicely smokey and the sauce was slightly sweet with a bit of a hot pepper bite:
check out the smoke ring on the brisket:
We went to Mexico, it was....exciting. We walked across the bridge and into Nuevo Progreso. Halfway across the bridge I saw the "blanca cavello" (I think) a little boy was chattering about, a white horse drinking from the Rio Grande:
No pictures of Mexico. We walked across the bridge, past the armoured vehicles with mounted machine guns, past the wall of sandbags shielding the soldiers with more machine guns, past the soldiers in full riot gear with assault rifles. We had been told that if we took a picture of soldiers they wouldn't shoot us, but we would be detained and our camera would be confiscated. We would not get it back, so I stashed the camera. We walked three blocks, crossed the street and walked right back. As of this minute I have no desire to ever return to Mexico, although they had a beautiful hand tooled leather saddle for $200. I'd have brought that home if I could have figured out the logistics...
We also drove to corpus Christi and met with Brenda, I'll post those pictures in a new thread because this is going to take forever to load!
I came back tanned and today it was 50F here, so the warm weather must have followed me home!
Annie
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