travels, races, and other musings

Texas State Aquarium and the Drive Home Emmaline generally gets up around 7 AM which is good and bad. It's good in the sense that we can get all kinds of things done in the morning. But, it's a bummer that we basically don't get to sleep in. Ah well. We got up, finished packing, checked out and headed into Corpus Christi for breakfast. We ate at a little country kitchen type place. We both enjoyed some eggs with all the fixins while Emmaline pointed at the toy trains that ran around the entire perimeter or the restaurant above our heads. Each time one came out, she pointed and signed train. It was fabulous toddler entertainment! After breakfast, we went to the Texas State Aquarium. We saw all sort of fish, turtles, river otters and some dolphins. Emmaline wasn't quite as into it as we thought she would be. She's generally really into fish, but I think some of them were a little big for her. They did have a really nice, large playground there and we took her ther...

Port Aransas and Back to the Beach In the morning, we headed north for the 20 minute drive to Port Aransas to see what that area looks like. On the drive up, we turned down a beach access road for a quick look at the beach. It was pretty empty, but a pretty beach, stretching on in both directions. There were a couple of cars, including a turtle patrol truck (looking for endangered sea turtles to protect).  Once in Port Aransas, we wandered around a huge souvenir shop and then walked around a dock a bit and looked at ducks and boats, then we were going to take a ferry, but on the way, we spotted a playscape that looked fun. We spent most of the rest of the morning at the playscape, letting Emmaline run around. We had lunch in Port Aransas at a Mexican restaurant before we headed back to Corpus Christi where we stopped and picked up some coffee before getting Emmaline down for nap. During nap, Roger went for a run along the beach while I goofed around on the computer. After nap...

Birds and Beach The morning was a little cool and overcast, so it wasn't really good beach weather. One of Emmaline's favorite words is "bird" (BUR!) so we started the morning by heading to a wildlife preserve that is a spot for migratory birds. She enjoyed the walk around the area and pointed at a lot of birds. We saw a couple kinds of gulls, some egrets and some assorted ducks and waterfowl. We walked about a mile and a half and at one point along the trail there was a cute little playscape that she played on a bit.  After that, we decided to head towards Corpus Christi to a little shopping area to do a little window shopping and have some coffee. On the way, we saw a HUGE (enormous, gigantic) play scape. So we pulled over and let Emmaline play for awhile. She had a really good time and it was a really neat area by the ocean. After playing, we got back in the car and headed for the shopping area. Everything was closed except the coffee shop so we hung out a...

Driving to Corpus Christi The drive from Austin to North Padre Island in Corpus Christi is about 3.5 hours. The plan was to get Emmaline asleep for nap, wait until she had a little bit of nap, then move her gently into the car and take off with her sleeping for the first half of the journey. Unfortunately, she woke up when we moved her into the car and never went back to sleep. So we were headed for a nearly 4 hour car ride with a toddler that had abut 45 minute of nap. Sounds like a recipe for disaster but actually, she did really well. For the first part of the journey, Roger drove and I sat in the back seat with Emmaline and we played. We had some toys that were brand new, just for the trip. We made a couple of stops for her to get out and run around. For one of them, we stopped in the middle of nowhere at a Wal-Mart and let her run through the toy aisle and try out some of the toys. They also had a little car ride thing out front and we pumped a couple of quarters into it. ...