We awoke to a beautiful summer day at the Isla Blanca SP, at the tip of South Padre Island, TX. The morning was bright, sunny, with a few clouds with a lovely warm breeze and a 75° temperature.  A perfect day!  Everything reminded me of one of those glorious summer days on the East End of Long Island in my youth. The sun set the night before was pretty OK too!

When we reserved a spot Isla Blanca SP, they provided a pass that indicated it was good for two days.  I presented it at the entrance gate and the explanations began.

We did have had a pass to the park, but it expired at 11:00 AM. It wasn’t’ 11:00 AM, but it soon would be.  Since it was the second day of Texas Spring Break on South Padre Island, and since every college kid in Texas was in town, and since there were two concerts scheduled for the park and since we were in an RV and since we will take up too much space, we couldn’t enter the park.

However, if we wanted to spend $30 to park in the dry camping section of the park and not stay overnight, we could do that.  The gate guy was polite, he had called a manager, I was polite, so we found a spot about 300 feet east of the park entrance and relaxed a bit in the glorious weather.

I’ve been interested in the space program since the Mercury Program in the 1960’s, so visiting the launch complex on South Padre Island, near Elon Musk’s Starbase, has been high on my bucket list. After a very relaxing hour, we took off to Starbase and the South Padre Island Beach Access. There is a shipping channel between the College Spring Break, High Rise, bar infested, restaurant capital portion of South Padre Island and the we’re going to Mars and we’ll launch the vehicle from here, portion of South Padre Island.

The road to the Starbase is a two-lane road that’s been beaten up by truck traffic and is in the process of being repaved. Starbase ran into some water consumption issues for the deluge for the rocket exhaust on a launch, so they’re in the process of installing a water pipeline. The water will be purchased from the Brownsville Water Authority. Starbase has agreed to buy the water on a metered basis. That’s impressive. The pipeline runs adjacent to the road, and final result will be a new water main, and a newly paved four lane highway, replacing the two-lane road.

There is new building everywhere. They’re constructing a new assembly building at Starbase. Closer to the beach is the launch facility. We drove there and found a parking spot not 500 feet from launch pad #2, a new launch platform. There sitting on pad number two was the version three booster. The version three booster has the version three Raptor engines.  The engines were not visible.  Closer to the beach and across the street, they were building an air condensing unit. One of the workmen told us Elon was tired of buying nitrogen, and that the unit would supply all the nitrogen they would need and also some liquid oxygen for use in the booster. The surprising part is that the launch platform directly abuts the road. There is construction everywhere. We were there on a Saturday and there was plenty of activity.

I was hoping to check out beach access, for future free camping, but with the number of normal visitors, spring break visitors, 4 x 4’s and other large, heavily treaded vehicles, accessing the beach, there was a 30-foot section of beach that had been churned into fine fluffy sand that would prohibit me from taking any RV onto the hard packed beach. There were a number of four-wheel drive pickups that appeared to have difficulty in navigating the stretch.

One of these days I would like to return to the area and see a launch. I was hoping that my friend Dan Becker could be with us this time while we scoped out the area, but unfortunately, that didn’t work out. Life intervened.

After getting our fill of tourism, we returned to Brownsville and registered at the Sunset Palms RV Park for two nights. We have been looking at RV parks, especially in the Brownsville area, as Yuma is a very long distance from Oklahoma City, and a nice place 1,000 miles closer to OKC might be an option.

The people at Sunset were very friendly and the rate for the park was equal to what we paid at Isla Blanca and they have a wonderful, heated, swimming pool and a very nice hot tub. We floated around for a while in the pool and hot tub and went back to the RV and grilled some shish kebab. It’s been the first time I’ve had shish kabob in about 10 years, and it turned out wonderful.

It was a great day! The relaxing style of traveling is starting to work. We’re both very pleased.