A Day on the Beach....South Padre Island

Saturday was beach day.  Beach day at South Padre Island that is.  Here we are crossing the bridge over to the island.

We got started a little late because we all stayed to say goodbye to Sharon and Debbie.  They had to head back a day early because Sharon wasn't feeling well.  Since we headed out a little later and we had a little over an hour's drive, we decided to all meet at the Shrimp Haus for lunch first and beat the crowd. The Shrimp Haus is part of Schlitterbahn but it is not inside the park.  Everyone is arriving.

Sue took a close up so everyone would show up.  The Pink FlaminGoes care about this and everyone else will just have to page through.  l to r - Margareta, Kim, Liz, MaryJane, Joella, me, Rhonda, Carolyn, and Birdie.  We are missing a few because Diana, Pat, Martha, and Shirley also came but arrived a bit later.  Gloria and Darlene opted to stay back at the resort.  In our group, everyone has the option of attending outings or not as they feel like.  The Longdogs were happy because Gloria and Darlene took them for a walk and visited with them in the RV for a bit while I was gone.

View of the beach from the restaurant window.

This surfing pool was right below the restaurant so I couldn't resist taking a picture.  Lunch was great.....except poor Margareta didn't get hers until after we were all done.  Good thing that she had the salad bar because at that point, she told them they could keep the lunch.  They were not busy while we were there so don't know how the big screw up occurred.

After lunch, we all went our separate ways for a while.  Sue took Birdie, Carolyn, Diana, and Margareta to a birding area so I went with Liz and Kim to Paragraphs Bookstore.  It's a unique bookstore that Liz likes to visit whenever she comes to the island. Dogs are welcome.  This is one of the resident dogs.

Sue met us at the bookstore and we left Liz looking at books while we went beaching.  This is Laguna Madre.

Then we across the island to the gulf beach.  It is just a few blocks away.

The water was blue so I'm not sure what happened to this picture but you can see the surf.

This a Portugese Man-of-War and yes, they are this bright color even when washed up on the beach.  We saw a number of them.  Although we were well aware of the danger already, a nice young man walking down the beach warned us not to touch them because of the horrible sting.

This one washed in while we were standing there.  We had a nice time walking on the beach and picking up a few very small shells.

There were a couple of events going on while we were on the island.  There was a Biker Fest (as in motorcycles).  While we saw some cruising around the streets, they were mostly congregated at the convention center.  We also heard there might be a surfing competition but we didn't see any surfers where we were.

On the way back, we stopped in Port Isabel.  Liz wanted to get some birds from this shop.  She got several of the egrets for her yard and I bought a wind chime.

We were right across from the Port Isabel Lighthouse.  There was a Market Day going on around the lighthouse.

You can climb the stairs in the lighthouse and I saw several people up where the light would be.

It was a beautiful day on the beach.