Saturday, February 4th, 2006 - A day at Padre Island National Seashore, Texas.

After awakening we watched the sun rise over the waters of the Gulf and enjoyed a short walk on the beach. Since the winds had died down during the night, the waves were gently lapping at the shore as we walked along the golden dunes. The winds and currents offshore tend to wash things onto Padre Island, and we saw several beautiful examples of the Portugese Man Of War. The colorful blue bubble and "sail" of the Man Of War totally belie the terrifically powerful sting of its long filaments of feeding tentacles (a neurotoxin, I think). The first time we visited Florida I didn't know what the Man Of War was and got tangled up in one while swimming, much to my regret. Detouring carefully around the Man Of War to avoid stepping on its tentacles, we returned to the trailer before heading off for the morning.

Our first stop was a local information center, and they told us about a local library where we could have free Internet access. That gave us a nice opportunity to check our email and spend a pleasant hour or two surfing the web. Monika checked German news and found that the Danish embassy in Damascus, Syria, had been burned because some cartoon caricature of Mohammed had been published in a Danish newspaper. Huh? You burn a government embassy because of a comic published in a private newspaper?? Talk about unthinking religious vengeance! Apparently the concept of "freedom of the press" is incompatible with something in the Moslem religion. Since the Imams of Afghanistan were also trying to kill a guy who had converted from the Moslem religion to Christianity, "freedom of religion" also seems to be incompatible with the Moslem religion. I'm a big fan of the Bill of Rights, and this all made me wonder which, if any, of our basic rights is compatible with the Moslem religion as it is practiced in the Middle East.

Returning to the trailer for lunch, we took our bikes over to the Visitor Center for the 1 p.m. Ranger talk, which turned out to focus on the Native American inhabitants of Padre Island and their tools. We were invited to try to use a stone to sharpen a shell, and I ground one against the other for over a quarter of an hour, to no discernable result except to smear the dust from the ground shell onto the stone. It surely would have been a tedious process to make tools like that from the raw materials available. The second part of the talk was a discussion on birding in the Corpus Christi area, and that was chock full of information on purchasing binoculars, tripods, telescopes, and books. After a very thorough introduction to the sport, we repaired to the beach to watch the shoreline birds with a 25-power scope, and that was fun. The wind off the gulf was quite cool, and even though I saw two kids playing in the surf with boogie boards, I still did not see any adult swimmers.

We asked for some garbage bags while we were at the Visitor Center and the Ranger was happy to oblige. That evening we did another beach cum garbage collection walk to the north, and were happy to find that the stretch we had already cleared was still noticeably cleaner than the areas further north. The best "markers" for garbage washed up on the beach seemed to be plastic bags. Some looked like the remains of old sandbags but most were just the standard clear plastic bag, and they seemed to get caught on the beach in such a way that they did not drift in and out with the tides the way the pieces of Styrofoam did. So we were still picking up chunks of Styrofoam and empty plastic bottles of various sizes, shapes, and colors that had drifted in on the last high tide, but almost no plastic bags on the section we had previously cleared.

We returned to the trailer near dusk, so we quickly had dinner while it was still light. Then we again settled in to read a few chapters of our book by lantern light before turning in for the night.