Texas Vacation

Early one morning a few weeks ago my wife awoke with an urge to go pick up seashells on a beach somewhere. We packed up the car and headed south to Galveston Island, Texas. Of course my sons and I decided a side trip to the Cabela's Store was in order on the way down.

Having spent over a year on the sea I no longer have a desire to see the sun rise up on the water but my wife did, so the next day we were up before daylight heading to the ferry that crosses over to the Bolivar Peninsula. For some reason the TSA guys at the ferry entrance decided my family of four looked like a group of terrorist and pulled us out of the line so that they could search our car. Now remember we had made a stop at Cabela's and had a few boxes of ammo in the trunk. Just imagine the thoughts I was having of my car stripped apart as they looked for the guns the ammo went to. Fortunately they just had me pop the trunk and hood so they could take a quick look.

I did make note that they didn't pull any of the cars to the side that had occupants not born here in the good ol' USA. It could have been my Oklahoma license plate that triggered their need to search us.

Once on the Bolivar side we headed towards Roll Over Pass which happens to have the best spot for gathering seashells. I also found reminders of the hurricane that just about swept the place away. I picked up pieces of bright colored tile and a ceiling fan blade.

From there we headed north to Glen Rose Texas. This is a great little town to visit. I recommend eating at Hollywood and Vine. The food was delicious. We also made a trip to the Creation Evidence Museum. Just after you turn onto the road to the museum there's the Stone Hut. You have to stop in and look around. It was well worth the trip just to talk to Morris Bussey. You can go to http://www.glenrosefossilhunter.com/ or look him up on Youtube. You can find dinosaur tracks in the local streams around the Glen Rose area.

All of this got us in the mood to find a few fossils ourselves, so once again we loaded up and took off driving towards the Mineral Wells Fossil Park where you can find and keep the fossils that you come across. On the way up we made another side  trip to Granbury where J. Frank Dalton is buried. The town seems to have become a tourist trap and I couldn't find anyone on the square with an interest in J. Frank, so we drove the short distance to the cemetery and located his grave. There were pennies scattered across the tombstone. I'm not sure if people left them there for luck much like a wishing well, but to not be left out I placed one there as well.

Mineral Wells is an interesting area, but I didn't have a detector with me to go looking for the gold that Frank James had supposedly hidden in the area. After a couple of hours of searching for fossils we decided that we had enough of being on vacation and headed north to our beloved Oklahoma. There's nothing like sleeping in your own bed.