Carl's Blog

I hope you enjoy this extra “non” vacation / vacation post. I guess technically I am on a vacation since I’m staying in a hotel, but it’s not one of my bigger adventures. This is the 3rd time I’ve run this 5K on South Padre Island, Texas. You can check out last year’s rambling here and the video I made from the 1st run is linked there. This race was different.

Well, the main difference was the weather, but that will be discussed later. To try and stay chronological let me start with dinner on Friday night. I know I ate at Gabriella’s last year but don’t remember if I ate there for the first race. But the past is the past and we are talking about the present err closer past… Well, I ate there again last night and had a wonderful meal. Ignoring the salad which was very lame, the wine and the main course was amazing. I tried the Pasta a La Tonno, which is basically pasta and tuna. But that doesn’t give this meal it due… There were sun-dried tomatoes in the sauce, along with mushrooms and the tuna was cooked medium rare just the way a tuna steak should be. Just check out the picture.

I ate too much garlic bread so there wasn’t room for dessert in fact I didn’t even finish all of the linguine. I did eat all the sun-dried tomatoes.

Now to skip to Saturday, race day… oh before I make the jump… I wish I’d remembered there was going to be fireworks on Friday evening. I only realized when I was awakened when they started going off. Sadly, I was on the wrong side of the island so if I had wanted to see them it was going to be more difficulty than I wanted to deal with in my PJs. On to the race…

There wasn’t any rain! and it wasn’t cold! It was still windy as ___, err I’ll let you fill in the word you want. The one I’m thinking isn’t “acceptable”. Overall, the race was as enjoyable as any other race, that isn’t cold and rainy. My overall time wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst. I am disappointed that my official time wasn’t recorded and I’m trying to contact the race coordinator on why. Based on my own timer, I was 10th place in my age division, taking about 44 minutes to run the 5 km or 3.1 miles.

After the race something strange happened, it seems I have a fan club of 2. I know, I was surprised too. After I finished the race, a young woman came up to congratulate me, I thought it was weird, but a fist-bump seemed appropriate, and I thought nothing more of it. About 10 minutes later as I was wondering to the team that had been passing out water for the runners, they were the girls that run the desk at my gym, the first young woman and another young woman found me and said, “you are the long beard guy”. Seems they’ve notice me at the last few races and decided to approach me at the end of this race. We exchanged first names, discussed the next races, the Turkey Trot and the Christmas series and then went to take pictures on the beach with our medals. It was very strange.

After the race I walked back to the hotel to take a shower and head off for waffles.

I really like Josephine’s. The waiter noticed I was playing Pokémon Go and as he brought me my coffee, and later my food, we discussed the game and how hard it was to get a group together to do the “big” raids.

After breakfast I headed to the kite shop to buy another yard “spinner” for Christmas. Last year I bought Santa on a bicycle. This year I’m adding a reindeer on a bicycle. While there I had a conversation with the owners and another customer about the Texas Renaissance Faire. To summarize the conversation, if you don’t dress up you are the strange person at TRF. Supposedly, the guy that does the Texas Bucket List visited with his family and seemed to have a good time even if they didn’t dress up.

So, it wasn’t even noon yet and I was tempted to go back to my hotel room, but just couldn’t do it. The weather was too good, and I had to do more outside. So, it was off to the South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center. The last time I was here was a few years ago in July. The inside presentation has improved with the addition of a reptile room and the addition of tortoises outside. You can purchase food to feed the alligators and the tortoises; however, you can only feed the adolescent alligators.

There is/was whatever, a Birding Festival going on at the SPI Convention Center, so there were lots of “birder” out there with cameras and binoculars. They were not disappointed. Just look at the pictures I was about to take with my phone.

Breakfast was still sitting well in my belly and I had signed up for a lecture series by Dr. Bart Ehrman on the Book of Acts, so I head back to my hotel room to watch the last part of the live broadcast.

I tried to watch on my laptop, but I could not get a good enough connection to the hotel Wi-Fi so I gave up and used my phone, which I’m currently using as a hotspot to type this post, to listen/watch the Zoom sessions.

Since I was no longer tied to my laptop, I decided to take a walk to the jetties and listen the lectures. I ended up walking almost 3 miles.

I did see on Google, that there was a statue of Jesus (Jesus Christ of the Fisherman Statue) near the jetties, so I wanted to go see what that was all about and once I read the inscription on the monument the statue made more sense.

This is a monument to all the fisherman that went to sea and didn’t come back. There are plaques along the base of the statue, and I wonder if those are some of the people that didn’t return.

I returned to my hotel for an early dinner or a late lunch depending on your point of view. I had drink vouchers to use. In the past I’ve eaten the fish tacos from the beach bar at the hotel, but decided I’d give the fried fish a try. It was good, but I’m not going to write praised about it. I finished my meal with the fancy pina colada in a pineapple.

Now that drink was good. Not sure it was $20 good, but it was very tasty, and I scraped the inside of the pineapple to get more pineapple.

I realized it’s only like 6 PM, but the sun had set, it was dark, and I was tired of walking, and after the pina colada I wasn’t going to be driving anywhere, so I headed back to my hotel room and started writing this blog.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my story. Tomorrow I will be grabbing a breakfast at a local restaurant and then heading back home to relax for the rest of my Sunday.

I had to take one final walk along the beach after breakfast. The surf was still rough but there was less wind.

Look a baby crab.

Until the next adventure… which will most likely be Christmas. 🎅🎄