Once we were settled into trailer park life, we started looking for any chance to get out of the trailer. Thankfully the winter weather on the coast, so far, was incredibly mild and we made the most of it with a day trip to the beach. The State Park is located on Mustang Island just a ferry ride away from Aransas Pass or bridge drive from Corpus Christi. We didn’t put a lot of prior planning into the visit because returning anytime would be easy, so we just packed the car with a few sand toys and lunch. The park boundary covers both sides of the narrow barrier island and consists of beach, marsh/wetland and camping. We decided on actual gulf beach before checking out the bay side.

Unlike other parts of Mustang Island beaches, this section in the park is not scraped and maintained with a roadway and while driving on most of the beach is still allowed, it’s quite dicey without a 4WD. So we opted for the parking lot a short trek over the dunes to the water. I quickly appreciated their policy for keeping the landscape wild. The dunes and drifts in the sand were very picturesque! And it allowed for much of the beach to remain powdery and pleasant to walk on.

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The water was beautiful and looked inviting, but the surf was quite rough and the water was decently cold, so the kids stayed knee deep. I was satisfied with just getting my feet wet! Brr! Sally, of course, had a ball zooming around the kids. lol

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Now that everyone was sandy and salty, we walked about a 1/4 mile to the bathhouse and were pleasantly surprised with how nice they were! But then it hit me that they were completely rebuilt after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Given that most State Park bathhouses were built no later than the 80s, this was a pleasant surprise! The kids enjoyed showers inside and Sally even got a rinse off in the outdoor area.

We hopped in the car and drove across the highway to a caliche road that snaked alongside a channel that connects the bay to the gulf. We were immediately disappointed that we spent so much time at just the beach! We want to fish this area! The kids really liked that we could have the car nearby (they were sour about carrying our stuff across the dunes), the water was calmer, and there are still beachy areas.

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We got a pretty good idea what this park has to offer! We will definitely go back for some fishing. I doubt we will bother with camping. While the sites looked well maintained and level, they are of course sitting out wide open and actually share the same bathhouse area that the public uses. Since we were there during the week in January, crowds were not an issue; but I could see the bathhouse being miserably backed up during popular times.

Now that tourist season has calmed down in the area, we may be getting around to fishing that channel sooner rather than later! I’ll update this post with a report. 🙂

-Lindsay