Day 23, Tonight at Comfort Inn, Ingleside Texas

I started the morning about 2:30 am, as the young peoples nightclub was getting out, loud Mexican music, cars revving up their engines and people talking really loud for me to hear on the 5th floor.

We started the morning by going to the 11th floor for the complimentary breakfast. What a view of the Gulf, it was windy so waves were crashing onto the rock boundary, and cloudy.

We then debated either going to the 11 o’clock Spanish mass or wait till 12:30 for the English one. Well we went to the early one in order to get on up the line. We went to the Cathedral, this mass was sparsely especially compared to the one that was getting out before we went in. the church was re-built in 1940 and is on the historical register. The inside is as one would expect big, with the alter in front but the Eucharist was at a side alter and was brought to the main alter for the mass. The side alter was for the Virgin Mary and as people walked toward the main alter they turned toward the side alter and bowed or genuflected to it, as one would expect. We read the parts on the left page that was in English, Spanish on the right. What was said during the homily is up for grabs; staying awake was difficult for me, as the 2:30 wake up call didn’t help. At the end of the mass, the priest came down the isle and shook each of our hand and said a couple words, he was shocked when he realized we didn’t understand Spanish, but recovered well.

We thought a good meal was in order, not much on the waterfront but saw an Omni Hotel, they generally have good eats. We went there for their buffet lunch. It was unremarkable, and there was no ham either, except for the fresh shrimp there was not much to talk about, after fleecing each of us for $36 that really made the experience hard to swallow; at Las Vegas it cost more but were well worth it. They must have got phone in requests for seating the day before and realized they needed to have more space than there dining room. So there were tables set in the ballroom, now you can see how many people were there. Ramon, our waiter said that the hotel was not prepared for the amount of people. He had worked there for the last 5 years and a number of times before, even living in Rockford IL for a while, then coming back for Mom. He was missing out on a family BBQ, He has a brother in law who cooked up a mean rack of ribs on the grill.

Now off to the South Texas Institute for the Arts,

http://www.stia.org/. The post Lewis and Clark exhibit was in its last day. There were many paintings, sketches and artifacts. Some of interest to us were those of George Catlin and Sully, they sketched paintings of Midwest Indians and Fort Snelling. Many nice paintings, and as we were walking in the room at our own pace, I was standing in the corner and thought, if these people didn’t do these paintings and sketches, we would not have known how things looked and events of those by gone years. Shirleen came to that spot and said the very same thing as I have just written, spooky. As I was looking at another picture of a cowboy on a horse, the lady next to me said to her male counterpart. See how the masculinity of the horse shows through the picture, to the beholder. Yes the muscles were well defined. She then said, it is similar to Remington’s works. I butted in and said that now I understand the difference in his and C. M. Russell’s works. When we saw their works earlier Dallas I asked Shirleen why do they always make the horses in these dramatic poses. Now I know why, to show masculinity. The lady said that is what’s missing in art now a days. We then went up to the Collectors Club Collection, that is a space put together by people of the area that buy art for the museum, there were two Rembrandt etchings, what detail. But as we walked into the room and turned right there in the middle of the room was a young lady laying on a table. She was covered by a sheet but looked so real I was embarrassed, as I had walked into her room. That is how real this sculpture looked. It was a live figure bronze cast painted in oil. It looked so real that it had light moles, veins in her hands, to bad we could not take a picture to show the detail. The sculpture was by a famous sculpturer, whose name I did not remember.

We then headed to the coast, down North Padre Island, nice looking homes and many dug out boating areas behind the homes. We went to the National Park and Shirleen got her stamp for the park three minutes before they closed.







We headed back up North Island onto Mustang Island. We ended up taking an access to the beach, as you can drive on it for miles. The waves were still strong and splashing heavily.

As we drove along we saw these jelly looking things washed up on the beach, I got out and looked at them and said they are Portuguese Man-of-War. We saw a couple walking and confirmed this. We got a charge out of watching the birds trying to get something to eat without getting wet, fun to watch. This went on for miles and Mom wondered if we would ever get off, I must admit, I was hoping that the gulf waters would not get any higher myself.

You see where we are this eve - jerr