I still hear your sea winds blowin'

We are at the Jamaica Beach RV Park, on Galveston Island (map).

We passed a mostly quiet night on the side of US77A last night. It was a dark and quiet spot, other than being punctuated occasionally by the scream of a passing car or truck. As with most rural two-lane roads in Texas, the speed limit is 70mph, except after dark when it drops to 65. (If that sounds fast, the four-lane divided roads are posted at 75, with some stretches of the Interstate posted at 80). There was little traffic after about 8pm or so, so we were not really bothered by it.

After a pleasant drive along some of the back roads of Brazoria county, we turned onto the barrier islands, crossed San Luis Pass, and arrived here around 3:30 in the afternoon. That turned out to be before any of the rally organizers arrived, so we walked into the campground office to see about parking. They did not have an RV space that was available for all three nights, which was fine with us: our rally registration, which was billed as "camping included," would only buy us a $10 nightly discount off the $38 rate. The "included" camping was on the grass in the tent area, so that's where we are. Well, actually, we parked in the grass across a drainage pond from the tent area, so our genny won't bother anyone. $28 per day will buy us a lot of genny run time at $4.50 an hour, and in the fairly temperate weather at the moment, we haven't had to fire it up yet.

As a side note, I never can understand why places like this will fill up completely, when a perfectly nice state park (with hookups) is just half a mile away and is 2/3 empty. The state park is also right on the beach, whereas this place is across the street, necessitating a quarter mile walk to access the gulf. To each his own -- I suppose that the pool and hot tub constitute at least a couple of checkmarks on the RV park side of the ledger.

There were perhaps a couple dozen rally participants here by yesterday evening, and we rode into town with some for dinner at "The Spot." A contingent went over to "The Poop Deck" afterwards for drinks, but we opted instead to return home and unwind a bit. Tonight's activity is dinner at "The Balinese Room." I understand that well over 100 people are expected for the event.

We will be here through Sunday afternoon, when the rally ends. After that, I suspect we will move over to the state park, or perhaps down to San Luis Pass county park in the other direction, to take in some more of the gulf on our own terms. By my reckoning, we can visit Galveston four more times before I run out of Glen Campbell lyrics to title the posts.