Sunday, March 8, 2009

A 3 day weekend in a the Rio Grande Valley

This has been a great three days in a semi-tropical paradise with lots of large palm trees, trees in bloom, plus the ever-blooming bougainvilleas and warm Gulf breezes! Well the warm gulf breezes gusted up to 30 mph winds but it was great anyway. the temperatures rose to the mid 80s F (29C) during the day and maintained a temperature of 70F(21) overnight. This is quite different that the high desert that ranged from 9C to 35C ! We get to use our A/C here more and it is working well.
We are well situated here in Brownsville with a half hour drive to Beaches, neighboring towns or Mexico. The Rio Grande Valley is 75 miles long and consists of 12 different communities varying in age and size.
The most famous location is South Padre island that is a 34 mile long stretch of sandy beach bordered by the Gulf of Mexico and Laguna Bay. There is an abundance of condominiums and of course an ample supply of shops, bars and restaurants!


This is a major fishing area and there are Shrimp Boats in Laguna Bay and other nearby ports.


There is an abundance of touring in this area and we just scratched the surface so there is lots more if we ever back in this interesting area.

Saturday morning we set out early to Flea Market 77 in Brownsville, TX and did a walk through a Hispanic Flea Market that was a combination of fruits and vegetables and tables of stuff that had been someones well used treasures and essentials.

From there we continued on to Harlingen to the Street Market that was in full swing by the time that we got there. Here I found a great collection of Milk Glass and other antique glass ware that I should have bargained on except for my other voice that says: "What are you going to do with that...aren't you going to downsize?" It was fun to explore this market and lunch was around the corner at a New York Deli that looked like a favorite of "Winter Texans".

From 2009-03-08 harlingen in Rio Grande Valley

Our "fun" trip of the day was to Progreso, Mexico where we walked across the border (cost was .25) and was able to get one of John's prescriptions that he forgot (NOT Viagra but it too is cheap!) at less than his portion on Blue Cross. It was a hot sunny Saturday and there were lots of pedestrians, hawkers, sidewalk and alley shops and mariachi bands. Fantastic atmoshpere!!





Sunday was a fantastic day for weather so back to the beach! This is the start of March Break for the College students in Texas and this beach should have 10,000 college kids partying here next week. We are moving on to Corpus Christi tomorrow and we will see how crowded the beach is there!


1 comment:

Snowite73 said...

I'm so jealous - it looks like a great place!