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.

Traveling Marilyn (Texas)

Even though I “captured” Marilyn with a fantastic traveling vacation, I didn’t truly understand how much she loved traveling until we moved to Houston, Texas. (Come to think of it, she did take me to a Canadian Rail Travelogue documentary at The Ohio State University. That was what prompted our long and unfulfilled desire to visit Banff.) She was an unabashed tour guide. She always loved to show her visitors the sights, many of which she had already scoped out, in person. She read tour books. She read the travel section in the newspaper. She watched all the travel shows on TV. Once based in our Houston apartment, we were able to put her research into practice.

She went to the tourist spots but also liked the out of the way spots. Our first year in Houston was spent at work during the week and on the road every weekend. It slowed down when we bought our first house and slowed even more when we started having children, but it never stopped. As our children got older, it picked up again. She loved the planning, the anticipation. She made all our trips a great experience.

Over the eight plus years we lived in Houston, went everywhere in and around Houston and Texas, except Big Bend and Amarillo. She always wanted to see Big Bend in the spring for all the desert flowers, but we were otherwise occupied: new house, new children, other uses for our limited vacation time.

We did see most of the rest of Texas, sometimes several times. Many of these are worthy of separate topics:

• Spots in and around Houston, including Bayou Bend, Gilley’s, San Jacinto Inn, Johnson Space Center, Galveston, …
• Mustang and Padre Island, along with Corpus Christi. (We returned regularly to Mustang Island.)
• San Antonio
• Austin
• Several camping and cabin excursions north, west, and south of Houston

As in many of our living places, if you could find a native Houstonian, Marilyn, and because of her I also, had visited more places and knew more about the local area than they did. If she did encounter an exception to that rule, she would usually pick their brains for recommendations on where to go and what to see, of course, she would also do this with her less traveled encounters. Everyone had been somewhere and she wanted to know about it.

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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.