It’s been a week since I’ve had time to post news! Let’s see, last Thursday, Susan and I left for a weekend vacation on South Padre Island. We had planned on staying through Monday. Our stay was cut short when we were kicked out of our hotel on saturday morning as part of the “voluntary” evacuation due to hurricane Bret. After checking out, we hung around as long as possible hoping to get some cool photos of a palm trees bending over in hurricane-force winds.

While we waited for the storm, we visited the small nature walk near the South Padre Convention Center. There’s supposed to be an alligator living there but in several years of looking we’ve never caught a glimpse of it. We did rescue some sort of tiny baby turtle that had wandered out onto the road and was in danger of being hit by a car. It was too small to tell if it was a sea tutle or just a plain-ol’ turtle (at least by me!). Anyway, we saw a few unusual birds and a strange looking moth that was big enough to be one of Mothra’s relatives – but no alligator. We eventually gave up waiting for the storm to get there and, after taking a few photos of the locals nailing plywood sheets all over there houses, we headed up to Harlingen and caught the next Southwest flight back to Dallas.

The flight itself turned out to be pretty interesting as there was a strange assortment of people who’d also been forced home early because of the weather. There was a party of about 10 or so drunken red-neck hunters from Arkansas who kept trying to flirt with the flight attendants and any other females that happened by. One of them kept telling the same story about having gone deep sea fishing in the gulf to about five different people on the plane. We did finally get back home and, as it turned out, the hurricane turned away from South Padre and hit the coast near Port Mansfield instead. Here’s a page with some South Padre Island post-hurricane photos shot by a local.