Texas!

It's 74 degrees and sunny, and I surfed today without a wetsuit.

No, I'm not dreaming and I'm not hallucinating. I'm in Texas.

It's my secret spot. OK, it's not secret. I have a weakness for offbeat barrier islands like this one, Padre Island. I'm staying right at the beach and surfing pretty much where I'm staying, but the water is a lot warmer than Rockaway. It's a family style, faintly blue collar (the fanciest hotel is Holiday Inn) place where the condos on the beach cost half as much as at home. This is Texas, after all.

I rented out an epoxy board. The waves were sucky but no worse than home, nor harder to catch. I caught some and got up and riding. In Texas slop if you catch a wave you'd better get up and riding; you don't want to waste it. I swear I felt just like Gidget, out there in just my vintage-looking bathing suit, the only woman, naturally. Killing it, relative to the other people in the water.

Once caught, the waves lasted longer than at home, long enough to be fun. I'm still working on the balance thing but this board made it easy. I like it. It has the honor of being the first rental board I've ever actually ridden. Oh, I've rented many, in five states and one foreign country, including during the California sojourn chronicled earlier in this blog, but that was all before I was actually able to get up. I never rode on any of them.

Today I was working on leaning forward and bending my knees, both of which were necesssary in order to keep from getting stalled on these little waves.

Wow, I had a blast!

Later on I checked out the Texas Surf Museum. Yes, don't laugh, there is such a thing. There are a lot of old amazing longboards shaped by Texas surfers dating back to the 1960s and even earlier, surf posters and photos and memorabilia, movies, a replica of a shaper's shack, an exhibit devoted to tanker surfing (a la Step into Liquid), etc. Plus lots of vaguely Texan and/or surf related CDs. If you are in Corpus Christi it's well worth visiting. They have a website too.

Corpus (as they say) is a nice town. I had a surreal experience driving to the surf museum tonight in the dark. There was such fog as I drove right along the bay, not sure of where I was going but trusting in the word of the surf museum guy, that I could barely see, but what I could make out were the Christmas lights of the mansions along the road. This part of town, which I hadn't seen before, is where the serious money lives. Although no one skimps on lights, what struck me was how it was all done so tastefully. Have I ever described the Christmas decorations in Rockaway? If I had a digital camera I would send you pictures. Oh Lord, I don't think words exist to describe such things. And I say that with no condescension and great affection, because I love the very over-the-top tackiness of it. No such thing as too much, too many, too tacky, too tasteless. The more the better. Reindeer, snowmen, Santas, sleighs, plastic Mary Joseph and Jesus, inflatable bigger than life Grinches, angels, snowmen in bubbles (I love that one), plastic carolers, candy canes, even speakers playing Christmas music 24/7. And lines of lights thrown artlessly up into trees.

Here the lights are, well, choreographed onto the trees. And instead of a plastic nativity set, I saw 1) a sepia toned faux folk art one; 2) one in which the figures were merely suggested with outlines of white light--a light sculpture, you might say. Beautiful.

This ain't the ghetto, which my neighborhood still is in many ways despite the overbuilding of half million dollar condos. I wonder how much each house along the bayfront here costs.