Vacation II

(<—–part I)

Day 3: The funeral was at 10:30 so we just got up, ate, checked out, and drove to the church. I got us lost (I am usually good with directions but on this trip I kind of sucked) but we eventually found it. (When the directions say "turn right" it helps to also read the part that says "coming from the north" and realize that if you are actually coming from the south, you’d better turn left instead.)

The funeral was nice, except for this one weird thing. I haven’t been to a church funeral in a long time, so maybe I just don’t remember this. But before the funeral started, the casket was at the front of the church open. About 10 minutes before time to start, the funeral home lady came over and said "Family, it’s time for the final viewing." All the close family went up and looked at Felix again, then sat down while the funeral home people closed the casket. At Regina’s funeral, the casket was open when we first got to the funeral home and the funeral home people came and closed it before the family came in. It seems like I remember being at funerals in a church where the casket is open, and I know they must close it at some point to carry it out to the hearse, but I just didn’t remember it being such a ritual. That would definitely be something I would rather do in private instead of in front of a church full of people.

A coworker of Felix’s gave a really nice eulogy. There were tons of people at the funeral, and surprisingly most went to the cemetary as well. The priest even commented on how many people were at the cemetary, especially since it was about 105 degrees.

After that, we had lunch in the church hall and stayed a while, talking to Patty and the family. By this time I was getting a little done with the family. David’s mom’s family is nice, in small doses.

When we finally left, we drove down to Corpus Christi. We passed refinery after refinery and finally came to the big harbor bridge. I was glad I wasn’t driving – it goes pretty high. On the way to the hotel, we saw the beach so stopped to let the kids get their first view of the ocean. (technically this was actually Corpus Christi Bay). We checked into the hotel, changed, and went to the beach.

I’d forgotten how…sandy…the beach is. Other than that, it was alot of fun. The water was so warm, and very shallow for a long ways. The waves were not too high and it wasn’t crowded at all. We stayed a couple of hours then went back to the hotel to change. We found a seafood restaurant right on the water where we could sit out on the patio, then – bonus! – a guy started playing guitar and singing. It was very relaxing. (maybe that was just the margaritas).

Day 4: We woke up, checked out the breakfast (this time, "free breakfast" really was just cold cereal and coffee), checked out of the hotel and drove down the street to the USS Lexington. This is a WWII aircraft carrier that has been turned into a museum. It was very cool. There was alot to see, and even an IMAX movie in the ship (we saw the one about fighter pilots). The movie was included in the price of the tickets, so I’d have to say that at less than $8 a person, this was the best value of anything we did the whole trip (well except for the beach I guess which was free). Parts of the movie Pearl Harbor were filmed on the ship. After we came out of the movie, we were surprised to see that it had started raining. We were pretty much done with the ship anyway so we walked down the street in the rain to the Texas State Aquarium, which was not worth the $12 per person we paid for it. There were dolphins, and the kids could touch sting rays and crabs, and then there were some fish. Nothing really spectacular. I was expecting more.

It was about lunchtime at this point but David wanted to get on the road to Port Aransas. I had the map, and ended up getting us lost yet again. My excuse is that I was looking for a restaurant and not paying attention to where the highway turned. We were supposed to get to Aransas Pass and take a ferry to Port Aransas (which is on Mustang Island) but we drove all the way through Aransas Pass and ended up in Rockport. It wasn’t that much out of the way (7 miles I think) but still. When we got to Rockport I realized our mistake and we got turned around and found where we needed to go. As soon as we got off the ferry we stopped and found a seafood restaurant, which was actually not that great and kind of expensive. David found a big chunk of plastic (like from a plastic bag) in his drink so he was pissed, and the waiter was kind of a jerk. After we ate we went across the street to the Chamber of Commerce and got a map of the city since we were going to be there 3 days. We drove down to the beach, and here we could actually drive along the beach so we did that a ways then found where we were staying.

I had made reservations for a little cabin, which had a living room, small kitchen, and bedroom. It was, as the lady said, clean and neat but not fancy. For $75 a night, we loved it. We checked in, changed, and went back to the beach. (Both in Corpus Christi and Port A we were walking distance from the beach – not right on the beach but 2 blocks at most). We were on the Gulf side of the island, so this time we felt like we were actually in the ocean. The water was colder than in Corpus but the waves were still not very big (yet…) We stayed for a few hours, then went back and changed. I ventured out to find a grocery store to get a few groceries for dinner. This was the day before payday, so we had like $40 to our names until the next morning. I got some pizzas and we just watched TV then went to bed.

Next: does Tropical Storm Erin ruin our vacation?