October 26th - Down to Brownsville

It's only about three hundred kilometres from Rockport to Brownsville, but things change quite a bit.  Live Oak forest gives way to tropical Texas scrub, and there's first sightings of things like Bear Grass, and "that really tall tree with the weird, pale, shaggy bark".  It was a lovely day for traveling, clear, hot, and a rare thing for Rockport, absolutely no wind.  The water was mirror flat, with Egrets and a Roseate Spoonbill cruising along.

coming into Corpus Christi

USS Lexington

Land of pleasure boats and oil refineries

"slowing" for a work zone

By the time we got to Brownsville in the early afternoon, it was hot and windy, with a few pop-up showers around.  WinterHaven was the park of choice, a gated community with some RV slots, which, with the Passport America discount was only $20/night.  Since we were looking forward to the wifi to make final arrangements for Mexico, there was, of course, none, despite considerable site advertising to the contrary.

 a little fancy for us but for $20

We decided to hit the border tomorrow, and get all the paperwork done for a clean run at the border Friday morning.  When I tried to plan a route to Matamoros via the Garmin, the Garmin had mysteriously misplaced Matamoros, and couldn't locate it.  Oh yeah, GPS is nutted along the border, to prevent undesirables from using location for nefarious purposes.  Quite irritating, since navigating in Brownsville seems beyond the Garmin as well.  Tried google maps online.  Nope.  Apple maps, hurrah, it works!
Travelling with a TV has been an experience, we've been watching free to air (used to be called broadcast) TV along the way.  Most channels in Brownsville are from Mexico.  It occurred to me that based on television, Mexicans must find us very boring, what with our slow, quiet, unemotional speech, lack of animated gestures and angry/sorrowful emotional facial expressions, not to mention our plain choice of attire.  There is also a Texan channel that consists of Walker, Texas Ranger all day, every day.