Christmas story and a cemetery visit

Christmas Day

The wind blew fairly hard on Christmas Eve so I guess we didn't hear Santa come and go.  George of Our Awesome Travels gave me the idea to leave the roof vent open so Santa could get in and it seemed to work.  Thanks George.  Our stockings were full to the brim.

My haul

This one had me stumped for a while.  I didn't know they called them a Direction Guide Ball.

And Sue looked outside and this is what she saw under our palm tree!!!  A new bike!!

Charlie was loving the new Buddy Heater.  Although it was not a Christmas present, it sure was appreciated on Christmas morning.  Charlie got some treats in his stocking too.

We did some face time with our daughter Kaitlyn Greg, Greg's mom Elaine, Grace and our youngest daughter Karalee first, and then the same with our daughter Sheri, Gord, Donovan, Dani, Reo, and Joey.  They had already been in the candy so it was pretty fast paced at their house.  We will face time Derek, Nicole, Abby, Silas, and Emma later.  We are sure grateful for modern technology so we can keep in touch with our family.

We just lazed around for most of the day and visited with Ed and Lessie and Kevin and Ruth for a while in the afternoon.  Ed and Lessie and Sue and I had decided to go out for Christmas dinner, but didn't research where we were going to go.  We asked Kevin and Ruth if they wanted to join us but they already had their dinner planned.  We headed for Victoria about 3:30 in hopes of doing the Golden Corral buffet.  Every old person goes there you know.  Well it wasn't open but just down the street was a Denny's.  We opted for that because you can't really go wrong at a Denny's.  They are normally fast with really good food.  Boy were we wrong!!!!  Let me say that we were over 2 hours getting in and out of there and our food must have sat on the rack for almost that long, because it was stone cold.  The waiter forgot most of our orders and it was just a bad experience all around.  So out of the 6 of us, only Kevin and Ruth had a good supper.  Good move on their part to stay home.  Sue wasn't feeling great by the time we got home, (not because of Denny's, cause she felt under the weather earlier) so we opted to got to take it easy, rather than play games tonight.

December 26, or Boxing Day as us Canadians know it as, was a cloudy dreary morning.  Kevin and Ruth decided to start heading farther south in search of better weather.  I don't think we will be far behind them.  I managed to get a picture of Sherman parked up with the big boys.  We would make a good looking convoy I think.

We hope we can meet up with them one more time before they start their journey through Mexico leading a caravan of 11 other RV's.  It sounds like an interesting adventure and you can follow them on their blog, Travel with Kevin and Ruth. We have learned a lot from them about the boon docking lifestyle although we don't quite have their energy to hike around the country.

And off they went on another adventure.

We decided to have an afternoon nap to catch up for all the late nights and early morning we have had  lately, but about the time we hit the pillow all we could hear was this boom boom boom boom.  I got up and looked and there was a group of young men on the beach with lots of beer and Mexican laughing tobacco (mara-jua-hina) with their trunk lids raised having a contest to see whose bass was the best.  So much for the sleep.  We started the generator to drown out the noise and watched TV.  In about an hour they left again thank goodness.  Not sure why they would think that playing their music so close to other people was a good thing!!!

While we were listening to their music I looked out and the "little tug that could" was working away engulfed in a cloud of smoke and fog.  He was just a blur, putt putting away. 

I decided to go for a little drive later while Sue had a little lay down.  I think she is feeling better now.  I headed down to the Indianola Cemetery.   If you remember my post from our Museum tour, this area is rich in history and there is no better place to witness that than a cemetery.

The cemetery was quite large but there didn't seem to be a lot of headstones.  I got thinking that this city was wiped off the map in 1886 and so between then and now, probably there wasn't a lot of maintenance done, and there have been a lot of hurricanes and bad weather since then that would destroy all the headstones.  So I guess only the hearty ones remain.

As I got looking, a lot of them were broken and almost gone.  A group of ladies did a lot of work cleaning up this cemetery a few years back.

There were lots of graves marking children who died of typhoid.  It looked like it wiped out this family.  The oldest child was 5.  Must have been a sad time.

And another family lost 3 children.

This family lost one child in 1872 and the rest lost their lives in the Hurricane of 1875.

I was perplexed that there were only flowers on one grave.  I guess that grave has some descendant living in the area that come to pay their respects.  Southern Texas and is noted for having colourful cemeteries and it is a family responsibility to pay their respects often.  Because Indianola died and everyone moved away, I guess there are no descendants around to look after the graves of ancestors.  Lots of the people interred here were Germans who died on the boats while immigrating to the USA through the Port of Indianola and were buried here when the ship arrived here.

As we were leaving we noticed that what we thought was just a concrete block, was actually what was left of a statue of some sort.  Apparently it is the original La Salle monument that has seen better days.  There is some writing on it but I couldn't read it.  Another monument to La Salle which was erected at a later date stands near the old courthouse foundation by the beach.

Old statue

Newer statue

I will leave you with what was the view out our window on Christmas morning. 

Our Location tonight:  Magnolia Beach Texas   Boondocking