Daytrip to the Gulf Coast

On Tuesday we took a drive to the gulf at Port Aransas and Goose Island. We are only about 40 miles north. We found that Texas is unbelievably flat in this area between Houston and Corpus Christie. The grasslands stretch to the horizon, and some areas are used for farming while most are cattle grazing land.
Speed limits on the two lane highways in Texas are 70 and even 75 miles per hour since it's a long way to get anywhere.
We found that the coast was still recovering from Hurricane Harvey which hit in August of 2017. There were a lot of damaged buildings and trees and bare foundations where buildings once stood. The docks jutting out into the gulf had mostly new boards on them from having been rebuilt after the storm. It's hard to imagine what these people go through after these devastating storms.
The area was mostly quiet, although there was some tourism coming back. There was also a lot of re-construction going on to fix damaged buildings.
We drove to Goose Island State Park to see what it looked like. The camping was open on the wooded side, but there was no camping on the bay side. Day use was open on the bay, and it didn't look like there was much different than when we camped there a few years ago.

The flat grasslands stretched on forever in this part of Texas

Cattle grazed here and there, and then we found the Double C Ranch with these great longhorn cattle.

At Port Aransas these off shore oil rigs were sitting on land.

A fishing pier on San Jose Island that was destroyed by the hurricane in 2017

We had a picnic here at the edge of the gulf.

Fisherman were confined to the shore since the pier was out of commission.