Today is Wednesday December 24 2008
Christmas Eve Day, I would have expected any warm tourist destination to be crowded with people, but that is not the case here on South Padre Island. Perhaps no one knows of this place, maybe I should not be blogging about it and telling the world. I for one am enjoying the slow pace and the peace and quiet of the island. Unlike Florida last winter where we did nothing but battle crowds and stand in long line ups, this is totally the opposite.
These few photos will show you what I am talking about. The main street of South Padre Island is practically deserted when I took these pictures just before noon. The first picture is looking North and the second one is looking South.
It is very easy and safe to cross the main street to walk to the beach. Here are photos of the beach, again looking North in the first photo and looking South in the second photo.
In comparison if you read about our Florida 2007 Vacation on this blog when we went to Naples Florida, if you look at the photos of Naples Beach, you will see that there is barely room to sit down on the Naples beach, yet here we practically have the whole beach to ourselves. The big steel pipe you see is part of the beach reclamation program that is going on. During Hurricane Ike, a lot of the sand was washed out to sea, so the Island authorities are in the process of pumping all that sand back out of the sea and placing it on the beach where it belongs. This pipe is used to pump the sand from the ocean and distribute it where needed.
After our visit to the beach we went back to the hotel for lunch, and then we took a short drive (everything is a short drive or walk on the Island) to the Wildlife Center where they have boardwalks set up and viewing stations so that you can watch the birds. I never realised that I was interested in bird watching, but I quickly got interested and enjoyed taking photos of all the different birds we were seeing. We didn’t know what a lot of them were, but part of the fun was going back to the hotel and looking at the photos and then looking them up on the internet bird identification sites that are online. Here are a few of the birds we saw today.
A Great Egret
A Common Moorhen
Red Head Ducks
A Tri Coloured Heron
We will be back to try and find some more birds another day.
Near the wildlife center is the Convention Center and there are some really great murals painted on the building.
We went for a couple of drinks across the road at Blackbeards and then had dinner in our hotel room.
To see all of our photos from today you can see them on my FLICKR site.
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