Rockport, Texas - some of our favorite things

 Note: We're including some blogs from the month of April that were interrupted when we had to make a speedy trip to Oklahoma to help after Denisa's Mother's house burned. So we are catching up with "old blogs" while we are still helping out in Oklahoma.

The address for Goose Island State Park is Rockport, Texas. This portion of the Gulf Coast is one of our favorite, and we have several favorite places in this area that we can visit over and over. We are visiting in the middle of their spring wildflower season, and that is a favorite thing for Denisa.

That field of flowers is in front of this grove of tall trees just a block off the gulf coast. This grove has a special parking lot, and we were content to stay here and watch the show.

If we zoom in a little closer, we can see that this is heron rookery. One of Denisa's favorite things is to watch the antics of these birds as they prepare to raise their families in the tops of these trees. Their nest must be sizable for these big birds and their babies.

We watched as the males flew out from the trees, returning with twigs in their beaks. They presented them to their female, who carefully wove them into their nest.

While most of the herons in this rookery were the large gray variety . . .

the smaller white herons were also courting and showing off their finest feathery poses to attract a mate.

Our next favorite stop in Rockport is an interesting one--the local cemetery. This time of year it is un-mowed so that the spring wildflowers can show off their blooms.

Our next stop of this day of favorite places is just a short distance away. But according to our GPS, that last mile is going to take 29 minutes. That's because we cued up in a line of cars to get on the ferry that runs between Aransas Pass and Port Aransas.

Our line of cars kept moving because they do a good job of managing this ferry line with five different boats that ply the water carrying all sizes of vehicles. We are in the pickup today, but we've taken our motor home on this ferry before

This is a busy waterway. Our ferry had to come to a stop to allow a large ship to cross in front of us.

These are ships coming from the deep waters of the Gulf into port. Besides ship-watching, one of our favorite things is seeing the dolphin that love to play in the ships' wake. We remember the days when we could leave the car and watch them from the rail of the ferry. Now passengers must stay in their vehicles where the view is limited.

This ferry ride takes us to one of our favorite little coastal towns--Port Aransas. But we have too many favorite things there to add it to this blog. So we'll continue our list of favorite things in the blog tomorrow.