First Month at Goose Island

It’s hard to believe our first month here is already over and we’re into our last month. 

Our bird walks have picked up considerably.  The park started advertising them a little bit and that helped get the word out.  Mark and I walk around the park every evening wearing our volunteer shirts (we call this roving).  We talk to a lot of folks at the bird blinds. 

We have a limit of 8 people on our bird walks. Masks are mandatory.

The Buffalo Solders came to the park for a couple of days.  They were very interesting.  These are Parks and Wildlife employees that travel the state giving presentations.

 We’ve seen lots of birds. 

Wilson's Snipe

White Ibis

American Bittern

Royal Tern

Hermit Thrush

We got a call from Ashley Furniture that the rest of our furniture was ready for delivery so we made a quick (4 hours in pouring rain) trip home to take care of that.   

Remember the kitchen table that wasn’t?  Well, the table arrived, the 4 legs for the table arrived, somewhere along the way the bolts to put the legs onto the table disappeared.

Enough bolts were found in the truck (probably from someone else’s furniture), and the legs were attached.  Since the bolts weren’t exactly long enough, we will be buying longer bolts as soon as we return home. 

The correct bed frame arrived, the dressers, and the end table were all in the truck.  A little accident occurred when one of the dresser drawers came open as they were bringing it through the front door.  We could hear them whispering about something.  We made sure we thoroughly checked out that dresser.  

Sure enough, one of the drawer pulls was bent.  Mark was able to bend it back, good thing, I’ve pretty much have had it with Ashley Furniture.

They brought the correct bed frame this time.

We spent 3 nights at the house before heading back to the park.  The drive was much easier with nice, sunny weather.

I mentioned last time that it’s oyster season.  We see many oyster boats in Copano Bay.  We’ve always been very interested in this place in Rockport that buys oysters.  The oysters are bagged on the boats and brought directly here where they are shucked and sold by the gallon.

$71 for a gallon of oysters.

Wonder where all those oyster shells go?  Right out the back door! 

A couple of times during the season they usually bring in a front-end loader and haul them away.  We’ve never seen the pile this large before. 

A couple of weeks have gone by since I took this picture and the pile is much larger now!

One of these days, when they don't look busy, I want to stop in and ask questions about the process and see them in action.  

We were asked if we would mind working the front entry one day while the staff was in training.  When we first arrived on November 1st, there was a volunteer hosts whose job was to work the front entry.  About a week later we came back from lunch one day and noticed her RV was gone.  For one reason or another she decided the job wasn’t for her and left the park.  There wasn’t another volunteer host to take her place.

We got about 15 minutes of instructions on what we were to do at the front entry.  Since we weren’t familiar with any part of the front desk operation, we weren’t able to handle money or change or make reservations. We were told we would basically tell people to use the self-pay and hand out maps. It wasn’t exactly that easy.  

A lot of people had questions, wanted to change campsites, didn’t have correct change, wanted to stay additional days, etc.  Luckily, most everyone understood that they were going to have to return the next day when the staff was available.

Stay tuned for our last few weeks here at Goose Island.