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+On some level it's never made sense to me to differentiate between oceans -- they're all connected, there's only one ocean. That said, there are some very different, call them personalities, and ecologies to different oceans, different shores, in different parts of the world. My favorite in these parts is the Gulf of Mexico. 
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-29_094249_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1092" class="picwide" />
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+We're a little way from warm, but it sure is nice to have sun and sand at least. If the wind died down it probably would be warm. Not bad for January.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-28_144512_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1090" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-28_144435_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1089" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-28_145107_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1091" class="picwide" />
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+If the wind died down though it'd be because we were somewhere else. Wind swept barrier island is a phrase that gets used a lot when you read about the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico, it's the defining factor of these islands. The wind brings the waves, the waves bring the sand. No wind, no islands.  
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+The wind shapes the land too, controlling what can grow here. Anything that grows out here has to deal with poorly drained soil, endless winding bending it and the occasional large dump of salt water from hurricanes -- the wind again. Once you get beyond the dunes, the sea oats, prairie senna, and gulf croton, the island is like one continuous marshy sea of bulrush, cattails, and cordgrass. Hardly anything is taller than my waist.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-29_133326_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1094" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-29_133210_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1093" class="picwide" />
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+It's a beautiful, if somewhat stark and, yes, windswept. We had warm and sunny though. Cold and rainy too. But if the sun was out, we were on the beach.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-31_121847_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1100" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-31_130130_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1101" class="picwide caption" />
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+The kids had been bugging me to take them fishing for, oh, two years now. A while back I finally got around to buying a fishing pole. Then I read up on surf fishing rigs, since I've never fished from the shore[^1].
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+I just bought a one day license since I knew we wouldn't be in Texas long. Naturally it was the coldest day we'd seen. But, after a suitable lecture on how fishing requires patience, we're probably not going to catch anything, etc, etc, we tossed the line out. It was out for about two minutes when Lilah announced she'd caught a fish. I didn't believe her, because seriously, I cast the line, It turned around to arrange my chair and she said she had a fish. No way. But, sure enough. She had a fish. Shows you what I know.
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+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01_30_071249_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1105" class="cluster pic5" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01_31_071249_padre-island-nat-seashore_lPVqe02.jpg" id="image-1104" class="cluster pic5" />
+</span>
+</div>
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+It did rain from time to time, never very hard, but enough to force a break from the beach. Fortunately there's plenty to do inside bus, like learning to sew. And no, no one gets stir crazy anymore. After our long sickness, when no one went outside for a week, being cooped up inside for one day is nothing.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-28_121839_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1086" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-28_122619_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1087" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-28_122748_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1088" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-26_130517_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1085" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-30_081927_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1096" class="picwide caption" />
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+The weather cooperated nicely to let us see the lunar eclipse, which was a super blue blood moon. Because in astronomy adjectives are cheap apparently. But it was really neat. We all got up early to see it, though the kids were considerably less enthusiastic about 5 AM moon viewing than I thought they would be. Go figure. I thought was pretty amazing to see the moon disappear into the darkness of the earth's shadow and then turn around and see the sun rising behind us a few minutes later.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-31_050824_padre-island-nat-seashore_MXGlLw9.jpg" id="image-1099" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-01-30_055628_padre-island-nat-seashore.jpg" id="image-1095" class="picwide" />
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+On a totally unrelated note, several people have asked me for more writing and more photos so I've added a couple things to the bottom of this post (and future posts). One is all the animals and plants we see in a given place. Frankly that's probably overly ambitions, but I've been recording the birds I see for quite a while, because I'm nerdy like that, so there's plenty of birds. In the future you can click on a bird and you might read a story or two about it, but I haven't had time to add them just yet.
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+I also started posting shorter notes, things that were interesting, but don't fit the narrative of a post. So far they're mostly about stuff that happens on drives, or things I think about on drives. I call them field notes. They're not edited and the photos are blurrier, but if you want more luxagraf, there you go. If you're clever with URLs you can figure out where a full list of notes resides. One of these days maybe I'll add a menu item for notes, but in the mean time...
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+[^1]: Like everything else fun, in California you can't do that.
diff --git a/published/2018-02-05_hugging-the-coast.txt b/published/2018-02-05_hugging-the-coast.txt
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+Our plan for the remainder of winter was to chase the weather along the Gulf Coast, working our way up into Louisiana in time for Mardi Gras. After a week on Padre Island we headed north, hugging the coastline up to Matagorda Beach, which supposedly had a beach where bums like us could park for free. 
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+It did turn out to have just that, but  it would have meant driving out on sand that was way too soft for the bus. We ended up at a rather pricey RV park for the night. Fortunately it was right by the beach, so we at least had a nice sunny afternoon playing on the sand.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-01_144056_matagorda-beach.jpg" id="image-1111" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-01_142033_matagorda-beach.jpg" id="image-1107" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-01_143128_matagorda-beach.jpg" id="image-1108" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-01_143453_matagorda-beach.jpg" id="image-1109" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-01_143522_matagorda-beach.jpg" id="image-1110" class="picwide" />
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+A couple people have asked how we find the places we go, and, after giving this some thought I think I finally have an answer. There are three ways we find stuff. The best is when Corrinne finds something. I don't know how she does it, but she'll sit there with her phone for a while researching things while we drive (I can only recount what I observed before we had the dingy) and next thing I know we're at some really great, cheap campground. That's about 40 percent of where we stay.
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+Another 20-30 percent of what we find is word of mouth. We meet someone, they say, oh you have to go to ______. So we do. The rest of what we find is pretty mundane, we look for green spots on maps, and sometimes we use freecampsites.net, wikicamp, guidebooks, etc. That's about it.
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+Matagorda Beach was a green spot I had noticed halfway between Padre Island and Holly Beach, LA. 
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+While we were there I met a couple on a beach who told me about a good county park up on Galveston Island. Under normal circumstances that would probably have become out next stop, but the weather forecast for Galveston was rain and wind for several days so we pressed on, up into Louisiana, to a place called Holly Beach.
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+The drive took us through Houston, which, like most cities, was largely forgettable except for one thing, the massive, ugly and rather ominous looking oil refineries and storage tanks the litter the coast for what feels like forever, but is probably only 20 miles or so. 
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+<img src="images/2018/16075485289_005828a107_o.jpg" id="image-1117" class="picwide caption" />
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+Sometimes it gives me great pause to see what we humans have done to our world. I hate that we need oil to do this. I hate that without all that ugliness this would not be possible. I have all kinds of stats about how little energy we use, how 65 gallons of water can last us a week, but in the end, we feed those refineries as much as anyone. We need a boat.
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+I was thinking about energy, oil and the end of abundant cheap oil all the way to Holly Beach. I don't know why I wanted to go to Holly Beach. I'd first read about it in Peter Jenkins book, <cite>Along the Edge of America</cite>, which is a good read if you have any interest in the Gulf Coast. But I have no idea why Holly Beach stuck out, it doesn't really figure in the book much at all, but for whatever reason my brain latched onto it and I wanted to go.
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+It turned out to be a sad little place. Broken down houses, a few renovated as rentals, but hardly anyone around anymore. There was free camping on the sand, but again soft sand so we just pulled to the side of the road and spent one night. The dead dolphin washed up on the beach didn't really make me want to fish and by the time the sun went down it was cold, raining and somewhat miserable. This is why Corrinne is usually in charge of where we stay.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-02_143654_holly-beach.jpg" id="image-1113" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-02_143534_holly-beach.jpg" id="image-1112" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-03_071500_holly-beach.jpg" id="image-1115" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-02_143831_holly-beach.jpg" id="image-1114" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-03_084511_holly-beach.jpg" id="image-1116" class="picwide caption" />
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+Of course, a cold, rainy day on the beach is still better than most days so it's not that I'm complaining, I'm just saying, if you want to find the really good camping spots, hit my wife up for advice, not me.