Neither Fire Ants nor Boy Scouts Stays These Campers from Enjoying the Beach

Another week at another beach state park on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Not just another ho hum, though.

Galveston Ferry

To start the week off, we drove south from Sea Rim State Park and took the ferry to Galveston Island, which we did last year, but it still was exciting.

As we loaded onto the ferry, Tracy drove the truck and trailer (man does our rig feel wide) through the allotted lane, counting on everyone to be on their side of the yellow line. That’s exactly how much room we had.

The sun was shining right on us so it’s hard to tell in this pic, but it feels like we’re in by the skin of our teeth.

We’ve towed the trailer on other ferries, like the short but exciting one over the Yukon River, at Dawson, Alaska, and the longer one on a huge ferry boat on the coast of Washington. I don’t know how Tracy keeps his cool doing any of it. It’s kind of like when you’re riding your bike through narrow barriers … if you stop to worry about whether you’ll make it, you definitely will falter. So don’t stop.

Galveston Island State Park

This is our second time camping here, so we knew exactly which site to pick. There are several campground areas with electricity, but we like the area without any amenities because that means fewer people camped near us, and we got the one site on the very end this time.

That’s the gulf in the distance, there. Note that I took this shot before the Boy Scouts moved in. Hold that thought.

Ah, peace between onslaughts.

Fire Ants, Again

If you’ve never had an intimate experience with fire ants, let me tell you about them. Here in the sandy soil near the beach, they don’t have time to build big, easy-to-spot mounds like you see on TV. The wind and high tides (I’m guessing) mean they build little hills, sometimes just little dirt rises among the grass.

Here’s a typical one in our campsite right now. Can you see the popsicle stick we stuck in the ground to warn us? I’ve circled it in blue. Yeah, me neither, usually. The actual fire ants are circled in red.

I won’t show you a close up of my feet because they are covered in bite wounds at various stages of healing. That’s because I have stepped in ants four times since we started beach camping this season. It happens when I’m busy doing something important, like walking backwards behind the trailer as Tracy backs it into a new camping spot and telling him where to go, or setting up the tent in the wind, or—get this—riding my bike to the showers.

See, last time we were here, we rode our bikes across the street to the campground on the bay side of the island to use the showers over there. For some reason, we thought that was the only bathhouse with showers at this state park. This year we needed showers so bad (a week of bug spray and sunscreen will do it) that as soon as we got parked we went straight away to the showers.

Except, some park ranger decided to reinforce the blockade across the short-cut road we took last year. The nerve! So we had to lift our bikes over the blockade, and, guess what, there was a mound of fire ants right where I stood with my bike up in the air.

Now, fire ants work fast. As soon as you stand in them, and I mean the instant, they rise up from inside their den and swarm over your foot and start the warning bites. These you feel like stings, and they make you move your foot, but by the time you reach down to get your shoe off, they’ve already gotten between your toes and up your ankle and are biting the serious, we-mean-it bites. And if you put your foot back in your shoe without getting them all out, they have a third-tier bite (in my experience) that’s basically you or them. Damn they hurt—when they bite, afterwards while the venom is still at work, and later when the blisters are itching.

So, when I say I’ve stood in fire ants four times, I’m saying I am a freaking idiot. I’ve had my entire foot (the same foot) engulfed by biting ants.

To add insult to injury, later that day of the shower, I rode my bike around the various campgrounds and found three other bathhouses with showers on our side of the street. At least we don’t have to be scofflaws again.

Banjo seems to be able to smell fire ants, and she carefully sniffs each bit of grass before setting a foot down. We don’t trust them not to spread out to her while she’s sleeping, though, so she’s been quarantined to the tent and on the concrete. Heck, while at the campsite, I’ve been staying in the tent or on the concrete.

Boy Scout Invasion

Oddly, the fire ants didn’t seem to bother the pack of boys who moved into our campsite one night. Three cars worth of boys (with the occasional yelling man) pulled in beside us and set up maybe four tents questionably close to our rig, actually, in our campsite, technically. I heard the occasional shriek and exclamation, “FIRE ANTS,” but not enough to deter them.

I was pissed enough about it to start riding my bike to the park gate to rat them out to a ranger (never mind my own rule breaking here), when I saw that about 40 Boy Scouts were set up in the tent-only area. Okay, so the ones setting up practically on top of us must be Boy Scouts having spilled over. Maybe the dads are having to deal with a set of boys they’re not used to, maybe they didn’t realize they’d be apart from the group. I turned around gave them a pass.

Oddly, the next morning after they packed up, I could find only one of my Crocs. That photo I took of my bitten foot above? That’s the last piece of evidence of my missing shoe. When I told Tracy I thought the Boy Scouts may have packed up my shoe, he responded, “Those weren’t even Boy Scouts!” Turns out he’d seen the real scouts all wearing their uniforms earlier, and our interlopers never had uniforms on. Campsite mooches. Croc stealers.

Beach Biking, Beach Knitting

If you stay still and knit, none of the insects or reptiles or sea creatures or even Boy Scouts bothers you one bit.