Texas to Florida Gulf Coast Road Trip

What a great road trip we took in April this year rounding the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida! Patti and I with our dogs made the trip to visit her dad in Hudson, Florida. After arriving we enjoyed a lazy porch rest with the dogs Slick (Black Lab), Jazz and Doris. 

Patti's dad, John Curry, is in the middle, Kora on the left and Patti in back.

While we were there we enjoyed picking fresh blueberries on their farm. This was part of our inspiration to grow our own pepper farm on Padre Island. We named our humble farm "Alejandro Pepper Farm".

Patti, "Lets go for a ride on my tractor"

 

John gets around his blueberry farm very easily with his John Deer!

Since this is a working farm Patti and I were glad to chip in and help with some yard clean-up. What a nice spread the Curry's enjoy in the Hudson area of Florida. Below you can see that Jazz was in paradise! She just loved chasing squirrels around and other types of creatures.

One of our traditions we started when we go on vacation is to take a day and go fishing. Yep, we were able to get a guide last minute to take us out fishing while in Florida. All details of our adventure are posted at our JustGoFishin Blog.

On the way out to Florida we stopped off at the USS Alabama museum to take in some history and stretch our puppies legs. We didn't have time to see the Alabama, but we did see the USS Drum and took the self tour. 

On the way back home after a great visit at the Blueberry farm we stopped in Biloxi and took a shrimping tour. It was a terrific tour in learning more about shrimping. They even let us bring Jazz and Doris along for the boat ride. 

We sure had a great time traveling with our dogs to Florida and back. A great week of relaxing while traveling the highways along the Gulf of Mexico.

More pictures we took on the trip....

Sketch of Patti & I at Church

Found this sketch of Patti & I in my stack of papers I was cleaning up. Kirk Sturgis sketched this out with a black ink pen while at church. He was sitting behind us in the pews and handed this to us when meeting was over.  Thanks Kirk for capturing the moment.

NAS Kingsville T-45 Simulator

Maj Dave "Pops" Shipley and IC1 Jessie Booth sponsored our family to visit the NAS Kingsville pilot training facility. Wow, what an experience. Big thank you to "Pops" for taking time out of his day to spend with us in learning all that is entailed in training our fine Naval Pilots. Truly an awesome experience.

Above Patti and her two sons; John and Eric and I are standing in front of a T-45 trainer used to train our pilots at this facility. What an amazing aircraft.

Patti, Eric and John in front of the T-45 Simulator dome.

Instructor control panel for the simulator.

 Maj Shipley giving John some pre-flight instruction while on the runway.

John sitting in the cockpit of the T-45 flying over Corpus Christi, Texas. John, a pilot himself, tried some touch and goes at the Corpus Christi airport.

Maneuvering some rollovers Maj Shipley gave him a storm to navigate through. John asked for an instrument landing and easily reduced his elevation to a soft landing while gliding through a thunder storm.

Eric trying out his pilot skills over Corpus Christi making barrel roll maneuvers.

Patti easily drops the throttle down and blasts her way up into the sky over Corpus from the NAS Kingville airfield.

My first time as a pilot was a great experience. Maj Shipley coaching me on the controls of the cockpit, I was able to easily take-off into the sky without any problems. Once in the air I headed up over Nueces Bay then down to Padre Island to fly over our home. Then for me the obvious choice was to fly over the Land Cut and Baffin Bay which are favorite fishing spots in our area. Maj Shipley gave me some ordinances to fire at my leisure. I fired them off in Baffin Bay as a new fishing technique.

Lake Livingston Campout

Camping off a month of celebrating Patti's birthday we enjoyed a weekend camp-out at Lake Livingston, Texas State Park. This was a much needed restful time to enjoy the great outdoors.

Doris & Jazz haning out in the woods enjoying every minute!

Leaky Texas Cabin

January 2011, Patti and I with kids and grand kids went to Leakey (Lakey) Texas to a cabin for a couple of nights. Patti won this trip at a American Heart Association auction and got a great price on our trip. What beautiful country this was to get away from the noise!



Grand kids really loved the simple pleasure of playing on a see saw... We did too!

We went to Garner State Park and had a great time hiking a trail up to a small cave and around down to the Frio River.

Evie throws out the first ball for the beginning of the Family Bacci Ball Tournament. Little did we know that this would go down in the family history books as the comeback of the century! Breyton & Amma fell behind Papa early in match. Papa owned a commanding lead that seem to be insurmountable by Bacci Ball Standards. However, Breyton with his unwillingness to give up and perserverance to continue his push to tie Papa and then beat him with the final through by 1 point. Final Score: 10-9. Below are some of the action shots taken by Sports Badger Illustrations, Jana

Breyton became the raining Family Champion of Bacci Ball

 Breyton waits for he turn.

 Consulting Amma during a time out.

Papa enjoying his early lead and taking a break with Evie. 

 This amazing Bacci Ball court will be in the history books as the place Breyton performed his skill and magic to beat Papa in an amazing come from behind victory!

The Frio River





Fall in New York, October 2010

First week of October 2010 Patti & I traveled to Bronx New York to visit David, Jana, and our grand kids. What a wonderful time to visit. Since we visited most of Manhattan by subway last time, we decided to discover what New York has to offer in the great outdoors.

One of the highlights was camping in the Catskill Mountains. Jana once again performed her magic and reserved a beautiful spot next to a softly rolling creek. It was just beautiful and wonderful spot.

We enjoyed an awesome family hike up Kaaterskill Falls and created the following movie of our journey.

This was a lot of fun getting some exercise while enjoying the wonderful scenery. The grand kids did marvelously on this hike!

The boys had a great fishin trip planned on the Long Island Sound. We recruited Captain Rich Tenreiro and his first mate Natalie Roseberry to take Spencer Mangum, Roroy Sandberg, David Badger, and I out to catch some Blackfish. Rich Tenreiro interview available at JustGoFishin Tales and Reports Podcast Show. Video below shows the great time we had.

Left to Right: Spencer Mangum, Dave Alexander, David Badger, Roroy Sandberg

Just another awesome vacation in New York. I've miss placed some other pictures we took of the Bronx Zoo and Apple Picking. Both were a lot of fun.

Garden Whirligig On Padre Island

My Brother Bryan Alexander made this cool garden whirligig for Patti & I. For those of you that know Bryan he builds things to last. Bryan is a talented ornamental iron worker and specializes in ornamental iron fencing. Bryan has his own machine shop with all the equipment he needs to create and build almost anything.

Bry made this garden whirligig out of stainless steel and the fan blades are made out of copper. The garden whirligig stands about 12 feet tall in total. 8 feet above ground and 4 feet underground. Digging a 4 foot hole was joyful. Then I pored 120 lbs of concrete ready mix to plant the whirligig for good. This has got to be the best ever of all garden whirligigs!

Thanks A Bunch Bob!