#119 Near High Island Beach North of Galveston TX Boondock

I found a free place to camp north of Galveston that's oceanfront so I'm kind of like that and the cat digs it too.

I was in Galveston riding around looking for a grocery store and I saw this logo, stop at Randalls. I had to stop and see what it was about. Turns out it's a grocery store, like Harris Teeter or Winn-Dixie.

I always try to take the coolest way so when it was time to go towards Galveston, I could have either gone on Highway Interstate 10 or I could have gone down the little scenic route which goes down to an area of the world known as the Bolivar peninsula and Goat Island.

I decided to go this way as it's very scenic and it will take me to Galveston eventually.

I found a campground on freecamp.net called High Island.

This was our destination and it was on the Bolivar Peninsula. Right after you turn into the area there's a wildlife refuge. We got there and the first thing we saw was a real big turnaround of a place. I decided regardless of what the website said I needed to drop the camper and take just the truck down this dirt road to see if it was RV capable. The road was in really bad shape because of a hurricane. A lot of the road was gone into the ocean and what was left was it's a dirt road but it was not what you would go down in an RV.

I'm very glad I did this test drive because we would have been stuck immediately and there was not even a great place to turn around. The next candidate site didn't seem to feel right because it was kind of a fork of two highways. It just made you feel very vulnerable although it might have been fine there would have been in the midst of a lot of cars going by all night. I thought we would just ride down on towards Goat Island and just see if there might be a Boondock available. I'm really glad I did. We started noticing that there were just all kinds of driveways going right to the dunes and everybody and their brother were camping right on the beach. I thought if I could find a place that was kind of not near anybody’s beach house I didn't think they would much care. I just did whatever I wanted to and you know I found the perfect little spot that was probably a mile from anybody's house. It had a driveway and I pulled over to the side of the road. I walked over there and pretended that I was the rig and just walked all around to make sure it wasn’t marshy or soft. It was tall grass and I wanted to assure the weren't any sharp metal objects or anything. It passed the walk test. I went in but you kind of got to go in and with some intent. Once you start you can't slow down because of loose sand. I just went on in and did a big old lazy circle but like I said with kind of a Non-Stop inertia kind of way. That worked out fine and we just backed right up to the dune and we had an oceanfront site for two nights.

We went to a nice little restaurant diner down the way and they helped us understand that a Big hurricane had come through about five years ago. It completely wiped out the whole island and that she showed me some pictures of what it looks like where we were standing five years ago and it was a moonscape. It occurred to me the cool driveway I was boondocking in was the entry to a former beach house that had washed away. This explained why there was a mile gap to the next house. They were all eaten in an hour by the angry ocean one morning 5 years back