On Sunday, March 12, 2023 we drove 188 miles from Sandy Creek Campground in Jasper, Texas down to Surfside Beach in Freeport, Texas for a week of “Boondocking on the Beach” for the first time.
We’ve boondocked (also known as “dry dock camping” and generally refers to camping in an RV where you have no water, electric, or sewer hookups) in Walmart parking lots, Cracker Barrel parking lots, in the desert at the base of mountains, along the highway in Canada and Alaska, and in a couple of State Parks over the past 20 months. But we’ve never done so on a beach and we had been wanting to try that, especially since Cindy loves the beach so much.
In planning our route this year, we saw the opportunity to boondock on the beach as we were traveling through Texas, so we scheduled a week of it in for March 12th through the 19th and were looking forward to the experience.
Then we realized, after scheduling it and the stops before and after, that we had inadvertently chosen the week of Spring Break in Texas for our boondocking on the beach undertaking. We kind of half-heartedly tried to schedule a stay somewhere else but since it was Spring Break week there was nothing available. We just resigned ourselves to being on a very crowded beach for the week.
When we arrived around 12:30pm on Sunday it was cold (about 60 degrees) and windy. The beach was busy but not over-crowded. On this beach the way the boondocking works is that you drive into the entrance, hug the area next to the dunes and pick any empty “spot” that strikes your fancy, as long as it’s not in front of someone’s home. My fancy was to take the first spot that wasn’t close to anyone else. We got set up, made lunch and watched almost all the beachgoers leave around sunset.
In looking at the weather forecast for the week we saw that it would be cold, windy, and rainy for most of our stay. It turned out to be true and ended up keeping most of the Spring Break crowd away during the weekdays. But it also kept us from sitting outside enjoying the sun and warm temperatures that we thought we would have when we scheduled this stop. The wind was SO strong that at times it rocked Nomad with its force, causing Cindy to fear that we were going to blow over on our side. So for her, being inside was almost as bad as being outside.
Monday there was almost no sun whatsoever so we didn’t get much of a charge from our solar panels. This would be the case most of the week so my days were spent reading dead tree books (I had a nice sized box of old Star Trek books that my friend Kirk had given me) while Cindy did a lot of cross stitching and then after sunset we would read our e-books on our iPads in the dark.
In all the times we’ve boondocked we’ve never been bothered by anyone. Not in parking lots, not on the side of the road, not in the desert.
That ended on Monday night around 11pm. We had gone to bed and fallen asleep. I awoke thinking I heard voices and laughing, but it was one of those feelings of being half-asleep and wondering if I was dreaming it or if it was real. Then it was quiet and as I lay there straining to hear and trying to figure out if it was real I heard whispering and quiet giggling quickly followed by banging on the outside wall of Nomad; bam! Bam! BAM!
Cindy awoke screaming and I jumped out of bed telling her it was just kids while throwing the covers off of me and heading for the front door. I got there within 5 seconds and threw the door open prepared to chew out whoever was there (“You kids get off my sand!”), but they were long gone in the darkness. I laid there awake for a while in case they decided to come back for more fun, but they never did. The next morning I saw bike tire tracks in the sand near Nomad and assume that’s how they got away so fast.
Tuesday’s weather was a little warmer and around 9 that night kids were driving by in their daddy’s trucks honking their horns and screaming at those of us who were camping. Welcome to Spring Break.
But the rest of our stay was fairly quiet. We were just mostly confined to Nomad by the weather, other than taking Bella for walks, so it wasn’t the beach experience we envisioned, lol!
We did do some planning for our traveling the rest of this year, especially to the Salem/Boston areas in September this year. And I got a lot of reading done for my Goodreads challenge. I set a goal of 100 books this year and as a result of our “confinement” I am now 9 books ahead of schedule.
Oh, and Friday, March 17, 2023 marked 12 weeks since Cindy broke her shoulder. She has slowly but surely been working to increase her activity in that shoulder over the last 8 weeks. I have been proud of how determined she has been to do so. Now she begins a series of exercises to increase her range of motion and strengthen the shoulder.
We may try boondocking on the beach again in the future, we’ll just make sure to schedule it during a warmer weather time and NOT during Spring Break!
Thanks for following the Wandering Wetheringtons.
Wow! That’s crazy. Are you stopping anywhere near Austin? Or in the mid-Atlantic this summer? I spend my summers in New Jersey these days. Would love to see you two!
Hey Lauren! We just left Canyon Lake, Texas (Between Austin and San Antonio) and are currently in Coleman, Texas (to the west of Austin) so we just missed going into Austin this time around. We’ll be going through NJ in September on our way back to FL, so I guess we’ll miss you there too. We will definitely keep Austin in mind during our planning next year and hopefully we can get together.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting!