Our last night in Corpus we had heard of this cool bar/restaurant that was family friendly. You could purchase a wristband and have unlimited game play for the whole night. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we decided to give it a go anyway.
We found out that on Tuesdays it’s taco Tuesday and they rent out their kitchen to a taco truck. We had our choice of Birria or Carne Asada tacos. We all chose Birria except for Hannah. They were the best tacos I have ever had. The plate came with 3 tacos, sauce and a bean stew. I couldn’t even finish mine.
Donny and I decided to eat up on the rooftop deck. The kids thought it was too windy so they ate downstairs. We loved it.
My favorite part, of course, were the pinball machines.
I caught Gavin playing the Iron Maiden one.
Hannah likes Guitar Hero.
There were so many different arcade games. Many that I remembered from going to the Quarter Deck which was our choice of game rooms in high school. The floor was see through down to the restaurant and bar.
If you just wanted to hang out and watch sports they also got ya covered.
I wish I would have gotten some pictures of Jackson, but he hates having his picture taken. He really liked this place too. We played air hockey and I think I’ve gotten him to like pinball. Well maybe.
Downtown Corpus has come so far. It used to be a place that you didn’t really want to go to at night. Now there are so many fun restaurants it’s hard to believe it’s my hometown.
I managed to snap a picture of this cool mural as we were driving back to our airbnb.
You really should visit Corpus Christi if you get a chance. It’s such a fun place and there really is a lot to do here.
Since Bethany and Cassidy were leaving on Monday she wanted to go to the beach. Hannah, Gavin and Jackson wanted to tour the Lexington so while we headed to the beach, Donny dropped the kids off at the Lex and met Bethany and me at the beach.
Cassidy loved the water. Luckily there were no red or purple flags flying, only a yellow flag which means swim with caution. We found out why. There were SO many jellyfish floating around in the water. I grew up in Corpus and have never seen that many in one place before. We caught one in a bucket so we could watch it swim around.
We still had so much fun running around in the little tide pools. Cassidy loved the “big beach”.
After a takeout dinner from King’s Seafood Bethany and Cassidy had to head back home because she had to work the next day. If you are ever in Corpus I highly recommend King’s. It’s not fancy and the prices are really good plus their fried shrimp is to die for.
While Bethany was in the kitchen she happened to look in the cup with the hermit crab shell and sure enough she saw a crab peek out of the shell. We couldn’t keep the poor thing so we took it back down to the bay and let it have its freedom.
The next morning, while everyone was still asleep, I decided to take a walk down to Oleander Point where we had taken the crab back. There is a little staircase that leads to a rocky beach. I wanted to do one more hunt for sea glass.
I had never been down to that cove. I had the beach to myself. It was so peaceful.
I heard someone coming and it was a lady racing down the stairs yelling “I made it. I made it. I made it”. She ran by me straight into the water and started dancing around telling me again that she had made it. Of course I had to ask her where did you make it from and she proceeded to tell me that she lived in Missouri and that it was her 59th birthday. She decided that she was just going to take a road trip, wanted to see the beach and she had just driven in. She was so happy and asked me if this was the beach. I told her it was the bay. She wanted to see the beach with the waves and the sand so I gave her directions and she thanked me and danced off to go put her toes in the sand. I hope she had a wonderful sandy day.
I stayed a little while longer then went to wake up the kids so they could have their beach day.
This post is heavy in pictures, but I just love the bay so much. I got a couple of our secret cove from the top.
Jackson decided that he didn’t want to go to the beach with us. (he REALLY does not like sand and we had something planned for that evening that I knew he’d love.) Rousing up two teenagers to get ready to go takes a lot of patience, but we finally got out the door and back to the beach. Gavin had never been. His family has land on the border of Arkansas and Missouri so that’s where they spend their vacations. He was not disappointed. For some weird reason the jellyfish were gone except for a random couple we saw floating around.
I found a big shell to add to Gavin’s collection.
I know some people rag on Corpus’ beaches, but I absolutely love them. Is the water crystal clear? No, but it is where I grew up and I love the smell of the salt air and the way you skin feels after you get out of the water. The smell of sunscreen and the way the sand sucks at your feet when the waves come in. It feels like home.
My blown glass fish where I keep all of the sea glass I have found over the years was fed once more.
It’s a 7 hour drive to Corpus Christi from where we live. That is a long drive with 5 people in an Elantra, but we made it on time for our airbnb check in at 3. There is nothing like that first smell of salt air. Bethany and Cassidy met us there from San Antonio. After we brought all of our bags in and got everyone’s rooms situated we decided to order food from one of our favorite seafood restaurants, but it was closed because it was Sunday. We just grabbed some Whataburger so we could quickly eat and walk down to our secret cove to hunt for sea glass, shells and hermit crabs.
It’s not actually a “secret” cove, but every time we go down there no one is there. We used to live one street over from where our airbnb is so we were excited to go back to our cove.
I couldn’t believe how many hermit crabs we found. Their shells were so pretty. We brought some of them up on the beach so that Cassidy could see them crawl around. Of course we put them back where we found them, but we did find one shell that didn’t have a crab in it so we brought that one back to the airbnb with us.
Cassidy loved climbing on the rocks.
It’s always so peaceful and the view is wonderful.
This has always been one of my favorite places.
Donny stayed back to rest, but I actually got Jackson to come with us. He is not a fan of sand.
My crazy daughter.
She was waiting for the hermit crab in front of her to come out of its shell.
My sister is 14 years older than I am. I have no other siblings, it’s just the two of us. When I was 3 years old she started dating this guy that was quite a bit older than she was. She was a senior in high school at the time. I’m not exactly sure how my parents felt about it because I was too young to be included in these conversations, but I know that they probably weren’t too happy. The only things I remember about him was that he drove a big car and, in my 3 year old mind, he wasn’t bad looking. His name was Fred.
Here is a picture of my sister and me. I was the mascot for her high school drill team.
My sister broke up with Fred. From what I have gathered is was an ugly breakup. She left for Kilgore College when I was 4. We were living in Corpus so it was, at that time, about an 8 to 9 hour drive. He followed her up to college and my parents had to get the college security involved. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it was about to get worse for us in Corpus Christi.
We started receiving obscene phone calls at all hours of the night. We didn’t know who or why they were calling, but my parents finally found out that someone had written our phone number on just about every sleazy bar bathroom wall there was. My parents fully believed that it was Fred who had done it since we had had so many problems from him.
Then one day my mom got a phone call from a women she didn’t know. She told my mother that she had gone to San Antonio with Fred and while they were there he had told the woman that he blamed my mother for him and my sister breaking up. He told her the only way he knew to ruin her life was to kidnap her youngest daughter, which was me. The woman was freaked out about it because, as she told my mother, he was serious and she thought he was crazy. My mother got in touch with the police, but because she didn’t have this woman’s phone number, this was way before caller ID, they couldn’t do anything. They did come out and show her how to shoot a gun and told her that if he was climbing into our window to shoot him and drag the body inside.
By this time I was 5 years old. Everything was going smoothly. We would still get phone calls, but we had someone go into every bar restroom in Corpus and if they saw anything about us they made sure it was taken care of.
Fast forward several years. It was a Sunday morning and my parents and I were getting ready for church. The phone rings and I answered it. There is a man on the other end and he asks, “Stacy, how old are you now?”. I asked, “What?’ and he repeated what he had asked me. I told him “I’m 11.” and he hung up. I went into my parents bedroom because for some reason the call really made me anxious. My dad just looked at my mom and said something like, never tell anyone how old you are on the phone. Now mind you, I had absolutely NO idea that he had threatened to kidnap me. I still ran around outside with my friends and came in when the street light came on or my Aunt Norma rang the big bell. It was life as usual.
A couple of years go by. We live out in the country. My dad was Principal of the school that we lived right next door to. Our house was kind of tucked away behind the school. My grandfather, on my mother’s side, lived with us 6 months out of the year and with my aunt in Mandeville, LA the other 6 months. That arrangement had been going on for years. One day our phone rings and the man on the other end of the line asks me, “Stacy, where is your grandfather?”. We had recently taken him back to Louisiana for his 6 months with my aunt. Luckily my dad was standing right there when the phone rang and he took the receiver from me and told Fred not to call us ever again. I still didn’t know the extent of the situation.
Now we have moved into the city of Corpus. I was getting ready to graduate high school. My cousins, who lived in this tiny town in Texas near San Antonio, came down to go to the graduation. We were all sitting around the kitchen table talking when my cousin told my mother that they had the weirdest thing happen to them recently. This guy walks up to their home, they lived on a dairy farm far from anything and down a dirt road, because he had car trouble and asked to use their phone. I need to mention that they are the ONLY people in Texas that have our last name that we are related to. It is also a very unusual last name. He asked what their names were. When they told him, he asked if they had relatives in Corpus. They told him that they did and confirmed that it was our family. The very next question out of his mouth was, what is Stacy doing now. They didn’t know not to tell him, so they told him I was graduating from high school and told him where I was going to college. My mother’s face turned white and she asked my cousin, “What was his name?’. My cousin couldn’t remember so she called out to her husband in the next room and he said, “Oh, it was Fred, Fred Lerma”. My parents told them what had been happening for years and they felt so bad for telling him anything about me. They said he just seemed so nice and what a coincidence it was that he happened to have “car trouble” right by their house. They told my parents that all he really wanted to talk about was my family and mainly me.
This is when my parents had to tell me what was going on because now that he knew where I was going to be going to school and the fact that it was several hours away meant I had to be very aware of my surroundings. It really did freak me out now that I had all of the pieces to the puzzle. My parents had told me when I was younger that if I ever saw Fred near our home or anywhere that I should immediately tell them and not to speak to him but to just get away from where he was. I did think that was a little weird at the time. One day I was playing outside and a car that looked just like his pulled around to our house. I jumped up and ran inside to tell my mother but it turned out to just be a friend of my sister’s coming to visit. Even though I was very young I still remember the fear when I saw that car.
I have no answers to why he did this. My sister doesn’t like talking about it and my parents are both deceased. I never heard anything about him after my graduation, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t still keeping tabs on me. I couldn’t figure out why there was a big gap from when it first started until the phone calls started, but when I googled him I found out that he had enlisted in the army.
Here is his death information and the picture of him that I found on his social media.
Although we live far away from the coast, we did manage to get some bad weather yesterday from the storm. The day started out so pretty. The sunrise was gorgeous.
About 1:00 p.m. our phones started going off with tornado warnings. Then the tornado sirens started.
The rain and the wind was insane. The sirens went off for over half an hour. We were ready to duck into the bathroom if things got really bad. Because we don’t have helmets, I got out 3 big cooking pots to put on our heads. Luckily we didn’t need to do that.
Our rain barrel was almost empty and I’m happy to say it’s now filled to the rim. Donny grabbed 2 5 gallon water bottles and was filling those up with the runoff.
Today most of the water has drained off and all of our plants are watered and happy.
Another thing that happened yesterday is while I was watching the weather I googled the name of the man that had threatened my family, threatened to kidnap me and stalked me, that I know of, from the ages of 4 to 18, had died in 2022. I will have to make a post about that whole incident tomorrow because it is a crazy story.
I have not kept up on here like I usually do. Mainly because I am still experiencing nerve damage to the fingers of my right hand. It is getting better, but it’s such a slow process. It makes it harder to do everyday things and typing is one of them.
We are having a slow, very hot, summer. Here are a few things that we have been up to and as boring as they may seem, I still like to journal them so that I don’t look back on this time and think, what in the world did we do the summer of ’24.
Watermelon. Donny brought home this giant watermelon. It was huge. I was skeptical because it had seeds and I’d been seeing all of the videos about the awful, rubbery, disintegrating melons on social media. Y’all, this was the BEST watermelon that I’ve had in such a long time. The past couple of years we’ve only gotten the seedless variety and have been disappointed. If you like watermelon then go get the seeded ones. I think everyone has caught on because at our local grocery they had crates full of the seedless and they were on sale for $2. There were only a handful of the seeded ones left and they weren’t even on sale.
We have a little frog that hops into the corner of our patio every night and just hangs out there eating bugs.
The morning glorys around our bottle tree have come back and are doing so well.
We had to run to the mall to grab Jack a swim suit for our upcoming trip and I tried my first Korean corn dog. It was so good! I got the mozzarella one.
Milo is still determined to make friends with Monkey, but she is having none of it.
The cats are probably the only ones enjoying this hot humid weather. This is how they are living their best lives.
Jackson and I have managed to get out and go on our thrifting dates. I found a vintage rooster picture made with actual feathers in a hand carved frame. You know I like weird artwork that no one else has and it was only $1.
I also picked up this gold leaf frame, also $1.
Any time I find Talavera pottery I will buy it. I just loved this cross and it was only $3.
My very best and most favorite find that I’ve had in a long time are these Birkenstock sandals. I had debated between the Birkenstocks and the White Mountain ones for a while and ended up choosing the White Mountain. I had looked at these exact ones online, but in brown. Since I already had the brown White Mountain ones these silver ones would have been my next choice. These were in excellent condition and only $8.
If you have any cork sandals, I highly recommend getting the cork sealer. I found mine on Amazon and it really helps preserve the life of your shoes.
Now we’re going to keep an eye on hurricane Beryl. We leave in a week to head to Corpus Christi and our airbnb is right on the bay. Fingers crossed there’s no flooding.
The Funky Frugalista 