Mustang Beach

After running my half of the 10-Miler relay (see previous blog entry) on Sunday, I immediately headed home to shower and head to the airport in Pearland. I didn’t even go past the race finish line, so though I was there and ran, I never saw anybody or got a chance to socialize. But there are other races, and I had stuff to do! Jose, Becca and I met up with another guy from their flying club and his friends and flew down to Mustang Beach and Port Aransas for the afternoon. What’s a 3-4 hour drive is only 1.5 hours by air!
It was a really beautiful flight and reminded me that even though a lot of Texas is ugly from the ground, it’s pretty from the air. We flew southeast to Freeport before turning to fly right along the beach the rest of the way. Jose flew the outbound leg and Becca flew us back home.

I sat in the back both ways, which is nice and roomy but the bad part is that it’s hard to see out the front window. I still managed to take a bunch of photos out the side windows though, and passed my camera up to the co-pilot for a few good shots.We saw boats sailing up the intercoastal waterway…

…and lots of the cool swampy coastline and barrier islands that lie between the bays and the gulf. The beaches looked pretty trashy from the air, a sign of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. A lot of the beach is remote and uninhabited, so I doubt it’ll ever really get cleaned up. The ocean will eventually wash the stuff away again, I suppose.

We flew over a remote lighthouse on Matagorda Island, and came up on an old rusted shipwreck as we got closer to Port Aransas.


We arrived shortly and landed at Mustang Beach airport. There were only a couple other planes there, but they had a nice little office area that was air conditioned and had bathrooms and was accessible 24 hours a day (which is more than you can say for Pearland).

Port Aransas has a trolley that runs around the island, so we hopped on and for the bargain price of $0.25, we rode the 2 miles into town and had lunch at a typical, tacky beach restaurant called Moby Dick’s. The shrimp po boy was pretty good, and I gulped gallons of liquid — I was so dehydrated after running in the morning and then flying in the heat of the day. (Those little planes don’t have air conditioning, in case you were wondering. They vent air into the cabin from the outside, which helps, but it’s still warm.) Becca made friends with a local pirate, and we hung out in the mouth of a giant shark across the street.


After lunch we took a stroll along the beach. However, we are all retarded and despite the fact that we knew we were going to the beach, none of us thought to 1) bring a towel or 2) wear a swimsuit, so although the water felt great, we couldn’t swim. Next time we will definitely come prepared.

Soon it was time to return, so we walked back to catch the trolley — but the trolley was a few minutes early, and we saw it drive by when we were still a quarter mile down the road. Becca tried in vain to hitch a ride from one of the many people driving golf carts around town, but they all claimed that their time was up and they had to return their carts. Hmph. It was getting late and we hoped to get back to Pearland before sunset, so we just started walking down the highway towards the airport. Two miles later, we arrived back at the plane. Just another part of the adventure…

It was sort of hazy out over the gulf as we flew back, and you couldn’t even see the horizon — it just transitioned from sea to sky.

All in all, it was a very fun day and I hope we do it again sometime. Bonus: I never felt even a tiny bit airsick! I think maybe my brain is starting to get used to the idea of flying in a small plane…
Here’s the full set of photos: