Viva la Padre!

And so, last Friday, the three of us, Ben, Elisabeth and myself took off in my new Jeep Commander for our annual trip to the southern most tip of Texas, South Padre Island. We'll be here for about three weeks, not doing much of anything except sitting on the beach and eating shrimp and crab.

It's a long car ride as you can see from the map - Houston to South Padre Island (where the red star is!). It takes about six hours with a few stops along the way.

And here is an aerial shot of the little island, in fact, I think it really is considered a sandbar!

This is the view to the right from our condo taken at about 7:00 pm today. Nice house on the right, always empty and boarded up. Hey, we'll take it!

And, the view to the left. Slightly hazy because the lens on my camera kept fogging up. There is no sunset because this is facing east!

The most exciting thing happening on the island visually is the new town called The Shores. As you can see, it is modeled on all those trendy Florida beach towns like Seaside and Rosemary Beach. It may be cheesy to be excited about copying Florida, but the lack of town planning on this little island has left a lot to be desired design wise, so The Shores is a breath of fresh air. It's been slow going for a long time, but this summer Ben and I are pleasantly surprised at the amount of building that happened over the winter. Many, many new homes on both the beach and bay side sprang up since we were last here. This is exactly where we want to live when we don't have to work anymore.

I love the picket fences, it reminds me of Seaside, Florida.

The portal to the beach. This reminds me of Seaside, Florida (see a pattern here?)

Front row viewing of the beach.

Now, this is what I call paradise.