Beachcombing

Gayle and I had nothing planned for today beyond enjoying the beach of Padre Island.  We put on our shorts in hopes of warmer weather and went in search of brunch.  With our bellies full we headed back to the beach near our rental.

Of all the things we are doing on this vacation, Gayle did her most in-depth research about Padre Island.  I I already shared that she learned that she was allowed to take home a 5 gallon bucket of shells from the Padre Island National Seashore.  She knew that you are requested to pick up trash while you enjoy the beach here, bringing out twice as much trash as you take in.  She knew we couldn't drive directly down to South Padre Island from North Padre Island.  Gayle loves beachcombing.  It is one of her favorite things to do.

We started near our rental.  It was so cold that we wore coats with our shorts. But it was beautiful.

Then we headed south to Padre Island National Seashore.  We stopped to watch windsurfers.  There were only four of them and no waves.  We didn't stay very long.

Padre Island National Seashore is covered in wildflowers, even at this time of year.

We felt like we had the place to ourselves, well except for the deer...

...and the birds that were unafraid of our presence.

In this place, blue jellyfish drift close to the shore in search of plankton.  They are enough of a nuisance that a sign next to the beach explains what to do if you get stung.  Consider this your public service announcement.

We got out at every beach we found in North Padre Island.  The seashells here are the biggest ones I have ever found on a beach.  I guess the saying that everything is larger in Texas might be true.  I put a quarter next to the shells we found to give perspective of how large they are.  I guess filling up a 5 gallon bucket isn't that impossible here.

We rested before we headed out for a dinner of sushi.  We topped off our meal with strawberry key lime pie.  Back at our rental we watched theTexas Rangers win the World Series.  We could hear cheering from the other units around us.  Texans are going to be happy tomorrow.

The Notebook

Our check out time at the rental in San Antonio was 11 a.m.  We had a 2 1/2 hour drive to our next VRBO on Padre Island where we couldn't check in until 4 p.m.  Needless to say, we didn't hurry to leave this glorious guesthouse.  By the time we left, I had totally forgotten that I wanted to drive past the Alamo.  We stopped for a leisurely late breakfast.  We shopped for shoes at DSW in Corpus Christi.  Not a hotspot tourist destination, I know.   However, a pair of shoes I brought on this trip broke in Austin and I was hoping I could replace them.  Alas, they didn't have what I needed.

We got to our place at 3 p.m. Since we were an hour early we drove to the beach access right next to our place.  You can drive your car right on to the beach and park, so we did.  Gayle got out immediately to do one of her favorite things, walk along a beach hunched over looking for shells.  Gayle had done research and learned that she was allowed to fill up a 5 gallon bucket of shells on Padre Island National Seashore.  She wanted to get started on her 5 gallon of shells.

It was bitterly cold.  The weather app said it would be very windy, with a high of 53 degrees.  We were parked beside a jetty so I decided to take an invigorating and chilly walk to the end and back. 

The end of the jetty was wet and slippery as the waves crashed over the rocks.

Dolphins swam by, and I was glad to be alive and traveling with my sister.

By then it was time to check in.  We have a two bedroom, two bath rental, with a nice long balcony that has a partial view of the beach.  It is pretty perfect except that it smells "funny".  Gayle and I kept trying to define the smell.  So far we can't figure out what it smells like.  All we know is we don't like it.

We basically threw our suitcases in our rooms and headed out.  We have planned to see our Uncle Stanley tonight.  He is our mother's oldest brother.  He is 95 years old and lives an hour from Padre Island.  The idea for this whole trip to Texas originated because we wanted to visit our Uncle Stanley while we still around to visit.  

He lives alone in the home he shared with his wife and her best friend.  They are both gone now.  He gets by with help from his neighbors and the love of people he has nurtured over the years.  He taught sociology at Texas A&M Kingsville for several decades and has many friends and former colleagues nearby.  I ran out to a nearby restaurant and brought food back for dinner.  For many, many years Stanley took groups to Mexico to visit archaeological sites and experience the wonders of the country to our South.  Gayle went with him twice and my dad went once. It was delightful to see Gayle and Stanley catch up with each other.

I had brought along several things to share with my Uncle Stanley.  I am working on scanning family photos from my mother's photo albums.  There are several photos of my grandparent's families and my great grandparent's families, plus photos that go back even further.  My mother didn't identify the photos and I wanted his help.  Here are three of my favorite ones:

My grandmother's Pennsylvania Dutch family.  She is the one on the far left.

My grandfather's family from the hills of West Virginia.  He is the one holding the drum on the far right.

This is a photo of my mother and her brother, Stanley, when they lived in Nigeria.  They are each holding one of my grandfather's hunting rifles.  It intrigues me to see these two children raised by staunch pacifist parents being allowed to handle guns at such tender ages.  

I could identify almost everyone in the photos above but ones like the following photo (which cracks me up every time I look at) needs some context.  Did I come from these women???

Stanley was able to identify all the people in the photos of his parents' families of origin but he was at a loss when we went further back in the family tree.  I was grateful for those he could identify.  

I also had a gift for him and a story to tell him.  A couple months ago I got an email from a woman I did not know.  She said her mother (who is 95 years old) is dealing with memory loss.  She is helping her mother by going through boxes of things she has saved.  In the boxes she found a small notebook that says on it:  Poems my father, Playford Bittinger, wrote while he was living and written down in this notebook by me, his daughter, Roberta Bittinger.  The woman who sent me the email said that her mother is no relation to the Bittinger family and can't remember how this book came to be in her possession.  The daughter decided she wanted to return the book to Playford Bittinger's family.  How many Playfords can there be out there, anyway?  One of the poems was written for the engagement party of Desmond Bittinger to Irene Frantz.  She began a Google search.  She learned that Playford had died in the 1930s.  Desmond and Irene were both gone.  But she found that Desmond and Irene had a daughter Pattie and her obit was online.  I was listed as Pattie's daughter and pastor of the La Verne Church of the Brethren.  She called the church.  They told her I was retired but gave her my email address.  She wrote to ask me if I would like the book of poems.  Absolutely!  But I did wonder how it came to be in her mother's possession.  She said she didn't know and her mother couldn't remember but in her research she had learned that her mother and my Uncle Stanley's family had both been doing Volunteer service in Castaner, Puerto Rico at the same time.  She said her mother had a painful family history and often latched on to other family's stories and things.  I would love to know the journey of this little notebook but, more importantly, I am just glad it made its journey to me.  The last poem in the book was written by my grandfather Desmond in honor of his brother Playford, following Playford's death.  I made a copy of the little notebook and gave it to my Uncle Stanley.  

Every evening my Uncle Stanley gets on Google Meets with his son and grandson from Australia, a colleague from Kingsville, his wife's nieces and nephew from Indiana, his wife's best friend's children (one from Texas and one from Hollywood) and his brother from Oregon.  We joined our Uncle Stanley in his office for a chance to talk with this good group of people on Google Meets.  They have been meeting every night for the last two years.  They started this nightly tradition in order to stay connected to Uncle Stanley.  It was a lovely group of people.  Several of them gave testimonies to how important Stanley had been to their lives and well-beings.  We joined the group for a little over a half hour but by then we were nearly roasted.  Our uncle keeps his home heated to 90 degrees.  You can see that on the digital temperature gauge at the bottom of the photo below.  

We had been there for almost 4 hours by then and our faces were red hot and sweat was dripping from our noses.  I had my uncle on one side of me and the floor heater on the other side.  I truly thought I might pass out.  We bid them all farewell and rushed outside to the bracingly cold air.  I kept the car window open for much of the hour drive home.  

Back in our rental by the beach, it took us a couple hours to settle down and fall asleep.

A Day of Learning of the Plight of Native Peoples

We woke to rain and wind.  Yesterday's high was 83 degrees.  Today's high was 47 degrees.  That seems like a drastic change in weather.  The cold didn't make us feel like going anywhere but we finally braved the cold to go to Box St. All Day for brunch.  It was a good choice.  

After breakfast we came back to the rental. Gayle wanted to do her laundry and rest.  Her back has been hurting since the Cathedral of Junk.  She spent quite a bit of time in that amazing place standing and verticality is what causes her trouble.  

I took her car and headed for the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Texas.  It encompasses five missions in San Antonio that stretch along the San Antonio River and illustrate the Spanish Crown's efforts to colonize, evangelize and defend the northern frontier of New Spain.  I decided to go to Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo.  I chose it because it is referred to as the Queen of the Missions because of how well preserved it is.  The National Park Service maintains and operates this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I stopped in the Visitor Center for a map.  The ranger told me that the only brochures they had left were in Spanish.  I said, "Well then it is a good thing that I am learning Spanish on Duolingo."  I turned on the audio tour on my phone and headed past the walls of the mission.

It was impressively large inside the walls.

The homes of the Natives were built into the wall.

The church is still an active parish that holds a mariachi mass once a week.

They had an ofrenda set up in the vestibule.

This is a Franciscan mission and they had a replica of St. Francis' corpse in a glass casket.  They had cut away the robe to show his stigmata, which they said he hid from the world to keep him from being tempted by pride.  

Since I still had some time to kill I decided to take the Mission Road to see what the other missions looked like.  Everywhere I went along the river there were signs warning of potential flooding, and it was really raining by this time.  I crossed one bridge that seemed close to flooding.  

I hurried across and stopped at Mission Espada.  There were no intact structures left.  It was windy and raining and one of the visitors before me had left their broken umbrella in the trash can.  Needless to say, I didn't stay long!

As I continued on the journey of missions I passed a cemetery.  My grandfather, a sociologist, liked to say if you really want to understand a culture you need to visit their cemeteries.  My mother often had us stop at cemeteries on our travels.  So I pulled in.  It was clear that people had come to decorate the tombstones of their loved ones, and perhaps have a picnic in honor of Dia de los Muertos.

I drove on to the Mission Concepcion.  I was running later than I had planned so I didn't explore it as much as the others.

The Alamo is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site.  Gayle and I remember being there as young children on a family vacation. We didn't feel like we needed to go to the Alamo this trip.  Gayle believes she remembers everything she heard on the tour from childhood.  But now I am interested in at least driving by.  I knew it as the fortress where Davy Crockett lost his life.  I didn't realize that it had begun as a Catholic Mission to convert the people native of this land.  It was abandoned in 1793 and later became a fortress housing a military unit.  Maybe we can swing by on our way out of town tomorrow.

Gayle and I decided that today would be our day to go to a movie.  I came back to our rental and we headed out to see Killers of the Flower Moon.  It is a 3 hour, 37 minute movie and worth every minute.  It tells the story from the 1920s of the Osage people.  After they were moved off their land to an area of Oklahoma deemed worthless it turned out to be oil rich.  Subsequently, the Osage became the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet.  There were many, many murders and unexplained deaths of the Osage people during that time in what became known as the Reign of Terror.  This movie tells the sad tale and int arrival of the FBI.  I think it is Martin Scorsese's finest.  If you have four hours to kill, I would recommend you see this movie.

We were pretty hungry by the time we got to our car.  We found food and headed home.  Tomorrow we leave for Corpus Christi and a chance to see our Uncle Stanley.  

Dia de los Muertos

Gayle and I wanted to enjoy the Riverwalk today.  We were confused about how to get the boat shuttle but after some research we thought we finally understood.  We parked the car across from one of the ticket booths for Go Rio.  We moseyed past the sculptures at the Briscoe Western Art Museum before we got to the booth.  

We learned to our dismay that the river shuttles don't begin until noon.  We were 90 minutes too early.  After some discussion we got tickets for the guided cruise that was leaving immediately and also got one day shuttle passes we would use tonight.  We hopped on and headed out for our 30 minute ride with our Australian guide, Stew.

It was lovely and we learned some things....mostly what restaurants are along the river edge. We returned where we began and paid the $20 to get our car out of parking.  I know who is making money in San Antonio!  By then we were hungry and grumpy.  We headed to Guenther House because it had good reviews and is right next to the river.  We were informed that we would be seated in just under two hours. We couldn't wait that long. We got back in the car and started calling restaurants to find our their wait times.  We settled on Halcyon Southtown Cafe because they promised us we wouldn't have to wait.

After a parallel parking situation that included a "helpful" woman barking directions at us, we entered the restaurant to discover that while we would be seated immediately the downside was that they had a DJ spinning records.  It was so loud it was almost unbearable....but we were hungry.  We got a flight of mimosas and ordered food to share.  The food was meh and our ears felt assaulted.  We were definitely the oldest people in the restaurant.

We returned to our guest house to rest a bit before heading to the Dia de los Muertos parade near the Tower of the Americas.  Gayle opted to stay behind and rest her back.  I took her car and headed for the park.  It was traffic mayhem.  The parking lot I thought I would use was housing the event.  I drove around through heavy traffic for 30 minutes looking for a place to park before I returned to our rental feeling defeated and disappointed.  I asked myself, "When will you be in San Antonio for Dia de los Muertos again?"  So I decided to take a Lyft over.  I was there in minutes.

I missed the beginning of the parade but I got to see enough of it to make it worth the trouble.

Some people were carrying ofrendas and some were simply carrying photos of their lost loved ones.  

When the parade ended I enjoyed all the sights and sounds.  Many of the local schools and organizations had created stationary ofrendas for the festival.  Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) was the focus of several of the ofrendas.

Most people were dressed up....some more than others.

They had two music stages.  One had a large mariachi band and the other one had a proud Chicana woman singing in honor of her Mexican ancestors.

Instead of taking a Lyft home I decided to get in some exercise and walked back.  Wind and rain are headed to San Antonio.  I could see the weather changing and I could feel it coming.  It was a lovely Fall walk with leaves blowing around me, an experience I don't get to have in Southern California.  

When I got back Gayle was rested and watching her beloved Kansas City Chiefs lose to the Denver Broncos.  Our plan was to take the Go Rio shuttle to the Pearl for our dinner reservation at the Arrosta Restaurant.  But when I looked up where we could catch the shuttle, I learned that they stop operating at 8 p.m.  We wouldn't be done in time.  We hashed out the options and decided just to drive.  The food was fine and we got home in time for a game of Scrabble.  I won't tell you who won....okay, I will.  I won.  

We decided that since the weather tomorrow will be rainy with a high of 47 we will go see a movie instead of freeze on the Riverwalk.  

Cathedral of Junk

While Gayle was looking at Google Maps to find a location in Austin she saw a location for something called the Cathedral of Junk.  We both immediately googled it and decided that we had to go see it.  Vince Hannemann created this amazing "sculpture" out of junk.  It is more than just a sculpture.  Cathedral is the right word.  He started it in 1988, inspired by a documentary he saw as a child about the Watts Tower in Los Angeles.  He is an artist who didn't want to buy material so he used junk.  Everything we read said, "Don't just show up.  Call first and make an appointment."  The voicemail on his phone said that the next appointment day would be Saturday, October 28.

So once we had our coffee and we were busy packing up to leave Austin, Gayle called Vince.  He answered and agreed we could come on by his place in about an hour.  "Please don't park in front of my house, park around the corner," was his request.

As we approached his house we could see a large pile, I mean cathedral, behind his house.  In front of his house is a small sculpture that includes Co2 cartridges, electric toothbrushes, a pair of boots, etc and the letters COJ (Cathedral of Junk).  A small bench out front has the following words inscribed on it:  "Welcome Peeps to the Point of Despair."  

Vince was sitting on his back door step.  He welcomed us in through the gate and introduced us to his three sweet and docile dogs:  Lucas, Smoky and the third one's name escapes me.  There is a donation box by the gate.  Vince encouraged us to start in a shed near the gate in which he has a brief timeline of how he got to the point of building a cathedral out of junk.  Plus there is interesting stuff everywhere.

In 2010, Vince was told that his sculpture was a violation of code requiring an engineer's letter.  It took seven months, tons of volunteers, an architect, a lawyer and an engineer for him to get the proper paperwork to keep most of his sculpture intact.  In 2019, he declared the sculpture 99% finished.  To call this 40 ton, three level artwork a "sculpture" can't possibly explain the magnitude of what we experienced.  It is impossible to capture the cathedral in a photo.

Vince told us about the two staircases by saying things like, "Turn left at the refrigerator." Gayle snapped photos of the suggested scavenger hunts (one easy version, one difficult version) and we set off.  

We found the refrigerator and started to climb up one set of stairs with interesting items seated in the cement.  

There is no welding in this sculpture.  It is all held together with wire, cement and pieces being "puzzled together", as Vince refers to the structure.  Gayle took a rest at the top.

When we got to the bottom, we turned at the refrigerator....

and headed up the second set of stairs made by using tires and cement.

Once back down we stood in the large room in the center.  It is amazingly tall.  It was raining while we were there but I looked upwards and imagined what it would have looked like to see the sun hitting all the mirrors, bicycles, cds, etc.  I was in awe, just like when I enter a large cathedral in a foreign city.  

I was on sensory overload after an hour of wandering around inside the rooms,

down the hallways

and then walking around the outside of the structure.

Gayle and I found a few of the scavenger hunt items but we missed many of them.  Back at the gate I asked Vince if he has ever been to Watts Tower.  "No," was his only reply.  We put in our donations by the gate, bid Vince good-bye and went in search of food.

My daughter-in-law and the waiter in Dallas both recommended we try breakfast tacos.  We worked up at appetite at viewing the Cathedral of Junk.  We headed for Papalote.  It turns out that I love breakfast tacos!

We still had some time to kill before we wanted to head to San Antonio so we drove down to South Congress Avenue, called SoCo by the locals.  It was a hopping place.  Finding parking was a challenge.  I turned around in the Jesus Deaf Lutheran Church parking lot to find some street parking.  The Texas School for the Deaf is located in Austin and is the oldest continually operated public school in Texas.

We found someone to take our picture at the I love you so much mural.

The street was packed with Gen Z pedestrians dressed for a night out, instead of for shopping in hot, humid weather.  We poked our heads into a couple of stores.  Austin is covered in art.  There are murals everywhere.  

And some of the crosswalks are rainbows.

We were hot and sticky.  The temperature outside was 80 degrees but the humidity made it feel like 88 degrees.  We felt like we were walking through a wall of water.  To cool ourselves down we got in line at Amy's Ice Cream (a recommendation of our waiter in Dallas.)  It was the best ice cream of my life.

Before leaving town we drove through Zilker Park.  We enjoyed some of sculptures at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden before we hopped on the freeway and made the 90 minute drive to San Antonio.

We are staying in the guesthouse of this home in San Antonio.

The guesthouse isn't shabby either.  

We unloaded, rested, wrote our blogs and then headed out for some Chinese food in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant close by.  We will begin to explore San Antonio tomorrow.