Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 - Driving the Texas Tropical Trail along the Gulf of Mexico.

After one more glorious sunrise over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, we reluctantly bid adieu to our campsite, hooked up the trailer, and moved out. Retracing our route through Corpus Christi, we turned north on U.S. 77 and joined U.S. 59 to head North toward Houston. Along the way we started seeing more trees, particularly the live oaks that stay green all year and the cottonwood trees with their peculiarly soft tops. About 20 miles outside of Houston we noticed a low layer of brown smog or air pollution began to obscure the horizon.

The traffic and particularly the truck traffic became much denser the closer we came to the city, and we finally decided we would rather wrestle with the city traffic the following morning, so we put in for the night just short of Houston. Our campsite had electricity, and stopping early gave us time to plug in everything we needed to recharge and work on the computers for a while to catch up on the the journal entries (me) and picture processing (Monika). Even so, we still had plenty of leisure time in the late afternoon and evening for naps, reading, and the pursuit of laziness.