Mosquito Misery

Heading west from New Orleans, we waited out the tail end of Hurricane Ida in Creole country and then took the coastal route to Galveston (oh Galveston). We had promised the girls a spot of alligator hunting and then couple of days on the beach, and we were all looking forward to swimming and sandcastles on the Gulf Coast.

The alligator hunt was a big success and the bayous of Louisiana and Eastern Texas were surprisingly interesting – endless reedy marshes punctuated by gnarled oaks draped in Spanish moss; lots of wildlife; little fishing communities built on stilts and sand; and a plentiful supply of oysters and shrimp.

As you can see, there aren’t many photos of us – we were prisoners in the van...the mosquitoes here seemed hungrier and more numerous than those in Labrador. We drove ever further around the coast hoping to escape the pests, but even the beaches were infested. Eventually, at Galveston we found some respite and optimistically told the girls that we would stay two nights at Surfside Beach – a little town just off the end of Galveston Island which, after some uncharacteristic research, seemed ideal - http://www.texasexplorer.com/Surfside.htm.

We had anticipated a genteel holiday village, an RV park a block from the beach and some lazy time enjoying the sea and sand. It was not to be....Apart from the millions of Deet-resistant mosquitoes, most of the beach had been washed away by Hurricane Ike a year ago and many of the houses were strewn, as rubble, along the shoreline. The tourist brochures had neglected to mention these small details, nor the adjacent oil refinery!!

Unfortunately for us, the high tides of this week had swamped the village, leaving the RV park a quagmire and sweeping away another house. We left the next day and headed inland towards San Antonio. Thankfully, yesterday we found a campsite at the other end of the spectrum – a pool, llamas, goats and a pond with a pedallo alleviated some of the girls’ disappointment at the foreshortened beach time. We are now in Texan Hill Country camping by the Guadalupe River, still scratching!