Seeing Texas: Mustang (and Padre) Island

I don’t really remember just when our first trip to Padre Island occurred, but we were on one of our seeing Texas road trips with my parents and sisters. We had gone west to San Antonio, Austin, and had even taken a longer trip south, on our own, so Marilyn the Tour Guide took the opportunity of showing my family a place that we hadn't seen. It was the first time we truly went to Corpus Christi, which wasn’t that impressive to us at the time, but then we also went to Padre Island, which was. Since we couldn’t drive very far on Padre Island, we ended up driving north onto and through Mustang Island.

I think it was the ferry at the north end of Mustang Island that really got us hooked but the plentiful and available car camping was at least part of the bait. We ended up going back to Mustang Island frequently that first year, even and especially in the remaining summer months. While humid, the breezes off of the gulf kept it from being unbearably hot, even in Marilyn’s two-person tent, which was much better, cooler than my larger canvas one and a whole lot easier to set up.

We got our camping on Mustang Island down to a science. Friday, shortly after I would come home from work, the 280Z would be loaded, packed with food, clothes, and cooking equipment inside and the tent and sleeping bag in a big canvas duffel bag outside on a bike rack. The Z looked a lot like it had a backpack on. I bet we carried that duffel more often than we carried our bicycles.

We typically ate sandwiches on the road as our dinner so we could get there sooner. Every once in a while for Friday dinner, but always at least once a weekend, we would buy a lot of cheap shrimp from some vendor and boil them up. I got quite skilled at pinching heads and we didn’t bother to butterfly them. With the seasonings that Marilyn carried with her just for this purpose, they always tasted good. What’s more, we didn’t have any refrigeration so we just had to eat them all, even if the mosquitoes drove us inside to do so. Like everything else is reputed to be, they were big in Texas, which made our tent’s screens all that more effective and they had to be after dark.

We were typically inside the tent after dark because of the mosquitoes. We had an electric lantern we would turn on and our first ritual was to find and kill all the mosquitoes that came in with us. We then would play cards, either two-handed bridge, which was really just to practice bidding, or Marilyn’s favorite, Spades. I don’t know when we learned and started playing cribbage but we didn’t play any cribbage on Mustang Island.

We only aborted the trip one time, when I didn’t pack the tent. Normally all the duffel bag stuff was already in the duffel bag and ready to go. While I had done the drying procedure before and successfully put the tent back in the duffel bag, this time I hadn’t. Maybe it was particularly wet or something distracted me. (Yeah, I should blame it on Marilyn because she was a most pleasant distraction.) The only real problem was how far we had driven before I remembered that we didn’t have a tent with us. If it had been any less distance, we could have made a quick return and still made Mustang Island. As it was, we were too tired upon our return to do anything but sleep. I think it was missing out on the shrimp that was the worst of it.

There were a couple of trips during bug season that came close to being aborted. One in particular we had to stop three times to clean the windshield. The windshield washer fluid and wipers were just not doing the trick and the resulting paste that was spread over the windshield may have been translucent, but it was far from transparent.

While we waded in the Gulf waters often, we never swam. One time our wading didn’t last long because of the spawning crabs. Now crabs typically didn’t bother anyone unless provoked but how were we to avoid provoking them when there were thousands, at least hundreds of them underfoot. It lasted as long as it did because we didn’t know what was going on. Then we noticed the people illegally catching them. You aren’t supposed to catch females with eggs.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.