Texas - Day 94 - across north coastal Texas

Port Lavaca/Matagorda Bay KOA, Port Lavaca
Friday, 5 February 2021

today's route

My decision to spend tonight in Port Lavaca was an accident.  I'd made a reservation at Sea Rim State Park, which is so far north on the Texas coast that it's almost in Louisiana, but I couldn't get the campsite I wanted until tomorrow night.  My campsite at Village Creek was reserved by somebody else for tonight, so I needed a place to stay for this one night.  All the state parks anywhere in the area were full for tonight, and this KOA didn't look all that far out of the way.  But the state map KOA uses is to a different scale than the AAA map I've been using, so in fact it is quite a ways out of the way for my plans.  Oh, well.  I saw part of Texas I hadn't seen on this trip.

Beaumont
For reasons I can't fathom, Google told me to get off US 96 right out of Lumberton, then get back on again, then get off again, then get back on again.  I ignored it, stayed on the highway the whole way, and had no problem.

Beaumont's city limits start the instant Lumberton's stop, which I suppose reinforces the idea that Lumberton's growth is a result of people who work in Beaumont but live in Lumberton.  Beaumont has 118,296 residents and, from what I saw, has a whole heck of a lot more going for itself than Lumberton does.  Maybe I'm not seeing something like crime rate or something, but Beaumont has many museums and beautiful old buildings and churches and seems very attractive; Lumberton seems dirty - literal dirt - with nothing civic I could find.  I guess they've got their reasons but I couldn't see what they were.

Part of the reason I was stopping off in Beaumont was to see the county courthouse.

Jefferson County Courthouse
in Beaumont

Built in 1931 in Art Deco style, the courthouse has 13 stories, which is unusual in an age when all kinds of buildings called the 13th floor the 14th, due to people's superstitions.  (I still remember seeing hotel floors labeled like this, and thought it hilarious (you know kids) because no matter what you called it, it was still the 13th floor.)

The courthouse seems to be smack in the Museum District.  Within a few blocks I found the Texas Energy Museum (which apparently could be named the Texas Oil Industry Museum), the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Museum.  

That last one includes memorabilia of one of the all-time greatest female athletes (which may mean she's actually one of the all-time greatest athletes of either gender).  She was awarded 2 gold medals in track and field events at the Olympics before she took up professional golf, in which she won 10 major championships.  She also did well in baseball and basketball.  And her doing all this in the 1st half of the 20th century makes it even more remarkable to me, since we all know nice girls weren't supposed to be athletes back then.

In this same area of town I passed a stunning-looking church.

St. Anthony Cathedral Basilica

The cornerstone was laid in 1903, and the church claims to be "one of the most resplendent houses of worship in the southwestern United States."  (Beaumont is so thoroughly in southeast Texas that being classified as a southwestern church seems odd.)

This whole area of town has lots of beautiful old buildings intermingled with very attractive new buildings.  Beaumont seems to be doing a good job of modernizing itself.  And then there's the nearby dog park decorated with a giant white water hydrant about 25' tall.  The only photos I could find were copyrighted, so I can't show you.

Beaumont appears to be proud of its local Lamar University, because I've seen a lot of ads for it.  It's a public college, currently with 15,500 students that I think are drawn from a large surrounding area.

Back on the road

I definitely planned today's route to skirt Houston, and this time I was successful.  

Instead I went through Baytown (pop. about 77,000), passing many chemical plants or refineries or both (I can't tell the difference).  At least one of them was the ExxonMobil plant, one of the world's largest ethylene plants.  Ethylene's used to force the ripening of fruit, and it's used in making polyethylene (usually used for packaging products).

I saw a billboard that read: 

     Biden = Mobs

     Trump = Jobs

plus 8 places (usually houses) with Trump signs and an additional 6 places with Trump flags.  I wouldn't have thought this populous and industry-oriented area of the state would be heavily in favor of the former president, but given all these signs, and the fact that the inauguration was more than 2 weeks ago, I guess I was wrong yet again.

I crossed the Houston Ship Channel on the Fred Hartman Bridge.  The ship channel allows Houston to be an international port by connecting ocean-going ships from the Port of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico.  Fred Hartman spent 24 years as editor and publisher of the Baytown newspaper (an interesting honor for a newspaperman).  This bridge is more than 2½ miles long and was a complete surprise to me, as I had no idea I'd be crossing it.  This was another one where I just took the center lane and did my best to keep my speed up and ignore the distance to the water and let all the other drivers drive their own cars without me worrying about them.

Fred Hartman Bridge

This aerial view of the bridge doesn't show what I saw at street level, but the pattern of those cables reminded me of a ship's sails and were really quite attractive.  They were a nice distraction from my usual fear of bridges.

This area south of Houston is highly populated.  As examples, on TX 146, I drove through Shoreacres, pop. 1,493; Seabrook, pop. 11,952; Pasadena, pop. 141,672; and Webster, pop. 9,083.  These numbers were from the 2010 census, and Pasadena alone has grown by an estimated 12,000 since then.  But if these 4 towns were combined into one city, it would rank #19 on the list of Texas's most populous cities.  In other words. there's a whole lot of people in the area not even counting the city of Houston.

Pasadena is the home of the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center, where all mission flight controls are located and all NASA astronauts have trained since the Apollo missions in the '60s.  I passed the entrance, and if you've seen The Martian, then you've seen the same view I saw.  (It looked just like itself.)

display of the shuttle carrier and a space shuttle

I didn't see it up close like this photo, but I could see it plainly because it's not that far from the entrance gate.  This is a permanent display of the shuttle carrier that carted space shuttles to and from the launch and landing sites for 35 years.

In Webster, I passed a sign directing me to the Challenger 7 Memorial Park, commemorating the 7 astronauts that died in the 1986 explosion.

I saw a sign advertising "Hey Fur Sail" with a phone number.  Has to be somebody with a sense of humor.

I passed more refineries and chemical plants, some of these for Chevron Phillips.

I heard on the radio that Christopher Plummer has died.  Tonight I'll watch Knives Out in his memory.  What a range of roles he's played over his career.

I also heard on the radio that the fastest growing religious designation in the US is "none."  Well, fervent church-goers shouldn't take this too much to heart: Americans have always been like a clock pendulum, swinging from one extreme to another.  This country has been through non-religious phases before and swung back to being church-goers; I fully expect we'll do the same this time.  I used to worry quite a bit about these extremes, but I think now that the point is that this country spends most of its time somewhere near the middle, a fact I find reassuring.

I came to Bay City (it's easy to get all these very similar names mixed up), pop. 17,509, which is the county seat.

Matagorda County Courthouse
in Bay City

The name "Matagorda" comes from the Spanish, meaning thick bush, referring to the canebrakes that were once thick along the coast (and probably prevented erosion and storm damage, in the same way the thick grasses that used to cover the US prairies held the soil in place and, when removed, resulted in the Dust Bowl).  The internet tells me that a canebrake is a giant grass, and appears to be a sort of bamboo.  What that word conjures in my mind is Tennessee Ernie Ford singing Sixteen Tons ("I was raised in a canebrake by an old mama lion . . .").  My mind is such a jumble of useless information by now I don't know how anybody'd know whether I had dementia or not.

I passed through the town of Blessing (pop. about 850), which got its name in 1903 when the railroad finally extended the rail line to the town.  They wanted to call it Thank God (I guess they really wanted that railroad stop), but the post office said that was unsuitable, so they changed it to Blessing.  (This story really strikes me as funny.  I hope you're as glad as I am that I look these things up.)

I passed through what I thought was the town of Deutschburg - I saw a large sign saying it was founded in 1911.  But if it was ever an actual town, I can't find it on the internet.  Instead, it seems to have been a close-knit German immigrant farming community that is continued today in its community center that still has events for the area residents.

I've seen several azaleas today that were in full bloom - very nice, though it seems a little early for them.  At the KOA I found a number of orange trees that were producing oranges, which surprised me.  Port Lavaca's only halfway down the Gulf coast of Texas, which I think of as too far north for oranges.

Tonight's KOA was a little unsettling to me in several ways.  For one, when I walked into the office, past several signs insisting people needed to wear masks, both the young women working there weren't wearing masks.  One of them put hers on to come stand right next to me, but I didn't find it reassuring because the other never did put one on.  For another, they had a smallish dog park, but they'd placed it out in the middle of a field, and the field was so sodden I wished I'd worn my rubber boots.  For still another, we were so close to a field of cows that I had frequent thoughts about the experiences of cowboys on cattle drives, listening to the lowing of the cattle during the night - they never seem to shut up.  And I worried that Dexter would suddenly realize those were cows over there and want to charge over to attack them, which fortunately he never did.  And for yet another, some of the campsites (not mine) were right on Carancahua Bay, which I'd never heard of but is an extension of Matagorda Bay, which I have.  So the entire campground got the constant wind and dampness that comes with being on the ocean but was a little disorienting since, to me, we weren't on the ocean.  Besides these, the owner complained to me that they weren't nearly as full as usual (explaining how I managed to get a reservation on a weekend, even in February) which he assumed meant the weather was about to change for the worse (not reassuring).  And as a final oddity, they had signs plastered all over the campground advertising Hunt Pizza, but when I asked at the office if they delivered, the young woman said a little grumpily that they would if they had enough staff available.  Which I took to mean no.  So with all that, I was glad I'd only planned to stay one night here.