the longest day

We did our longest day’s drive Wednesday. Starting from Inks Lake we drove through Austin and then through Huston and way out to Smith Point. Smith point sticks out between Trinity bay and Galveston Bay. The inland coastal waterway runs by the point. We found that there is no point in coming to Smith Point.

Along the way we saw signs for the best Bar-B-Q in the world at the shell station in Waller, Texas. It was lunchtime so . . .  Let me tell you, that B-B-Q is pretty darned good and the place was crowded.

 

People rushing into the Waller County Line BBQ

You are served there at a serving line. Signs are all over everywhere  telling you what the choices are. One choice was “boudin” which we had never heard of.  Brenda asked this fellow in line what “boudin” was. With a twinkle in his eye and a wink he said, “That’s pronounced BO-DAN and, well it can be about anything as long as it is spicy and stuffed in a sausage skin. It is really good here.” So I got that and Brenda got the B-B-Q pulled pork sandwich.

Thank God I got the “mild” boudin. The boudin was lots of rice with bits of some sort of meat like substance mixed together with bits of possible vegetable matter seasoned with unknown spices and then all that dribbled over with Louisiana hot sauce. This mixture is stuffed into a #00 gauge sausage skin and probably fried or B-B-Qued. It was delicious!

We got to Smith Point by asking a nice lady at the Anahuac Wildlife Refuge visitor’s center where a good quite RV park close to High Island might be.  She said there was a quiet one out at Smith’s Point. So we drove about 30 miles on increasingly smaller roads until we were on a quarter mile long gravel drive to the “RV Park”.  It was late, we were tired, so we joined the other three rigs here.

Our reason for this dash to the coast is that there is a storm coming through. High Island is a famous birding “hot spot”. Birds migrating from South America and Central America make land fall here. When they run into a storm they get backed up over the Gulf of Mexico until the storm breaks. So, right after the storm, all these migrating birds drop into High Point to rest and refuel before going on. When a storm hits during the peak of migration the birds drop in by the thousands. We are past the peak migration but still wanted to see one of these events.

A swampy spot in the High Island Boy Scout Bird Sanctuary

We beat the storm by a day so we drove about 45 miles to High Island where we found a nice quite little RV Park and the Houston Audubon Society’s wildlife preserve. The regulars said it was a quiet day, not many warblers. We spent the whole day and saw about 60 species. For a quiet day we thought it was spectacular.

The little pink and white spots are birds.

Here is a telephoto shot so you can see the pink spots are Roseate
Spoonbill and the white spots are various egret species.

When you bird out where we live you might run into a handful of birders at the good spots. I wasn’t expecting the crowds of birders that we joined. They have large parking lots at the various preserve sites and they are filled. If it weren’t for the birders I think the town of High Island would die.

They have alligators here.