South Texas Road Trips

We've already talked about our annual trip to South Padre Island. But we also made some other trips in the Rio Grande Valley. One favorite trip is to downtown Mission, Texas, for the Citrus Parade.

Mission claims to be the home of the Texas Ruby Red grapefruit, and they celebrate it with floats that are decorated with slices of citrus fruit. If you look carefully at the two floats above and below, you will see the slices of grapefruit, oranges, lemons and limes.

This parade also features many high school bands, and princesses wearing lovely gowns representing every type of fruit and vegetable that is grown here in the Rio Grande Valley.

Spanish is the predominate language spoken by the locals, and they embrace their Spanish heritage. Denisa still is wishing for one of those colorful skirts that the dancers swirl up to their heads. She's just not sure where it will fit in the motor home. 

The neighboring town of McAllen hosts an illuminated Christmas parade in December, and one of their floats made its way to the Citrus parade--no citrus included.

Another weekend we made a trip to Brownsville, Texas, to take Denisa's Mother shopping. She is a fan of the SAS shoes that are made in San Antonio. She owned many pairs of these shoes, but all but the pair she was wearing were burned in the fire last April. She's working on replacing her collection, as she purchased four pairs at the SAS outlet in Brownsville.

Betty had never seen the Spaceport outside of Brownsville, so we took her there. This is where Elon Musk's company has been building and testing rockets since 2014. Currently, they are working on the Starship, the rocket designed for missions to Mars. The little road that dead ends near here has been torn up by heavy traffic from construction trucks. We followed one of those heavy construction vehicles all the way.

Mark and Denisa visited here last year, but Betty was surprised at how close we could get to the rockets.

A fence kept us from walking right under them, but we could see them up close.

On our trip last year, they were working on these tall buildings where we assume they are building even more rockets.

At the base of those buildings is an Air Stream RV park, where employees of the spaceport live.

A few miles further down the road is the launch site.

We drove Betty's car by the launch site, and right onto Boca Chica beach. This might be the only place where you can drive your personal car onto a beach with a rocket view on one side . . .

and an ocean view on the other.

It was cool and windy, but we still took a little walk down Boca Chica beach.

This beach has a few shells and lots of shore birds.

After driving down the interstate on this road trip, we opted for the farm market roads on the way home. We love driving by the fields to see what they are harvesting now. We are at the end of sugar cane season, and most of the cabbage and cauliflower have been harvested. We still saw onions in the ground, but many of these flat and fertile fields have been prepared for the next crop. We could look down the straight rows of carefully terraced ground for as far as we could see.

We love buying fresh produce straight from the farmers. One of the best places to do that is at the weekly pulgas. "Pulga" is the Spanish word for "flea," and we have a couple favorite flea markets. This one is around 7 miles from our campground, but it feels like we are in a whole different country. On Saturday mornings you can drive through this pulga. But be prepared for crazy traffic where shoppers pull over at random places to make purchases through their car windows.

Denisa prefers to walk the pulga, while Mark is braving the traffic to look for a parking place. Denisa always hopes she can find him when her load of fruits and vegetables get too heavy. She bought five avocadoes for a dollar, and large cucumbers that were three for a dollar. They grow large sweet carrots that are a favorite, and can only be found at the pulgas. We often buy blueberries for $1 per quart, and blackberries for $1 per pint. We stick to buying food items, but this pulga also has vendors selling goats, rabbits, chickens, parakeets, ducks and other live animals.

You can also buy cleaning supplies, used clothing, food for lunch, plants, hay, contact lenses, snow cones, get your windshield crack fixed, and your windows tinted. And don't forget that you can buy lots of stuff that looks a lot like junk.

Almost no English is spoken on this road trip, so we do a lot of pointing to make purchases. We didn't make the road trip to cross the border into Mexico this year, but some of our south Texas road trips felt like we did.