A Swinging Day

 Adventure Location: Rockport, Texas

Adventure Date: 12-29-2020

Click the pic to enlarge it.

WOW another beautiful day, so the OFM put off the change of computes chore for big adventures. Sure enough he ran the area roads until dark today. 100+ pictures were taken and we had to at least segregate them first. After sorting and viewing we split them into groups that sort of went together. There is several blog story entries available from those piles. Tonight we get the short one. 

                     The Big Tree. 

Do a Google search “Texas Big Tree” and check out a couple of the articles about the Big Tree. It has a long history  with Indians, bombardment, kids swinging on it and lots more. Here is a picture of that live oak that has been part of the OFM’s life for over fifty years.

It is at a very non-de-script spot on St. Charles Bay but it is a long time, hundreds of years, land mark inthe Texas and before Texas history. One of the early encounters with it was when the OFM’s three year old son, he is 41 now, was swinging on a lower limb of the tree. That limb is now gone thanks to some idiots that tried to kill the tree. Here is a picture from the information sign of the popularity of the “swinging limbs” in years past.

We took this picture of the back side where the idiots did the damage and you can tell there were some huge old limb coming from that truck back in the old days. We are afraid the weathering will do more damage these days.

This visit the OFM noticed the huge tangle of roots at the base of the tree. Some of those roots are huge. Hopefully all the extra work the locals are doing will keep the Big Tree growing for a few more generations to enjoy.

But there was still another adventure awaiting the OFM at this location. We met a wonderful young couple from the upper Texas panhandle who were here on the coast for their first time. They made the mistake of pausing to say hi to the OFM. About an hour later they finally got to leave with enough new information and where to get more information just about the Texas coast to get them to come back. We could use a lot more decent folks like them in the area.

The action did not let up for the Teams until we went into the Castle at dark. It has been a very intense day of trying to have tooooo much fun.