Weekend on the Texas Coast 🌊 (Things DID NOT go as planned…)

You can go camping for free on the beach. Almost got stuck there. Got a little nervous. Then she transferred us to the Coast Guard. Yeah, a branch of service. We were like, oh god this is so embarrassing. Our goal since being back in Texas is to show you guys the wide variety of scenery in the state. We've explored the hill country, hiked through canyons, and now this weekend we're heading down to the beach. We're currently driving four hours south of Austin to the Corpus Christi North Padre Island area, which we've never really been to before, to do some beach camping and exploring. We have officially made it to Padre Island National Seashore, which is located on the northern part of Padre Island. This area is actually managed by the National Park Service, so there's a $25 fee for seven days to get into the area unless you have the America the Beautiful Pass. And the reason we picked coming to this part of the Texas coast versus all the other areas is that you can go camping for free on the beach. There are two areas you can camp at, the North Beach and the South Beach. We're gonna go with North Beach because we're following our North Star. We don't really have a good reason. I think just because it was closer, so we're gonna give it a shot. Oh wow! Cool! Oh, they just drop you off right here. The road just ends, and the beach begins. Almost got stuck there. Got a little nervous. We made it out here and check out our awesome spot. We got the ocean van right here. We read online that you don't need 4x4 to get out here, so I figured the sand would be nice and packed down, but the way out here was a little scary. It felt like the tires were spinning at one point. Felt like we were gonna get stuck, so I was pretty scared. But we made it out here. We parked on some wood pieces so that hopefully we don't sink down at all. I don't know if it'll help. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But one thing you do need to remember if you do come out here or park next to a beach is that the tide is going to come in and out. So we made sure to park as far away as we could. We don't see any wet sand over here, so we should be okay. So the Padre Island National Seashore is the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world. It separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Laguna Madre, which is one of the few hyper saline lagoons in the entire world as well. It's about 70 miles of coastline protected by this park. It's not only protecting the beach, it's protecting all of the dunes, prairies, and all of the wildlife that call it home. Only other beach that we've been to in Texas is Galveston. And if you've been to Galveston, you may know the water's a little bit brown, but the water here is really nice. Far out, it's pretty blue looking and it looks a lot cleaner. And the sand is so soft and powdery and the beach is really clean, except for all the dead fish that are on it. But I don't know why they're there, but it's not that bad. But besides that, it's really really nice. One of the best perks of camping on the beach is you get to fall asleep to the waves crashing onto the shore. And not onto the van because we parked away from the tide. A little bit better than the trucks rumbling next to you at a truck stop. For sure. We slept like babies last night listening to the waves as we fell asleep. It was amazing. And we could have hung out at the beach all day long today, but since we've never been to this part of Texas, we thought we'd go exploring. So we drove up to the Port Aransas area to Lighthouse Lakes to go kayaking. And we'll tell you a little bit more about Lighthouse Lakes in a bit. But first, we have to get across the ship channel in our kayak. And there have been some pretty large ships coming through making some pretty gnarly waves that would probably flip our kayak. So wish us luck. Lighthouse Lakes was the first Texas paddling trail first mapped in 1999. It's a series of four loops that vary in mileage and they take you through mangroves and seagrass flats. We have a destination in mind that we want to go to. We're not totally sure how far away it is. We can see it, but at the rate that we're paddling, I don't know if we'll make it by the end of the day. So we'll see. A lot of the parts of the water, parts of the way, it's really shallow. Like you can just stick your hand in and touch the bottom. So we have this fin on the bottom of the kayak that just keeps digging in and we get stuck. And I have a feeling like at some point we're gonna have to get out and just walk it. So we had read that it was pretty shallow, but we thought maybe it was like one to like two feet. It's like six inches shallow. We just keep getting stuck. So Adam's gonna try to take our fin off while I'm in it. Okay, maybe we'll move now. The downside of not having the fin though is that it doesn't move as straight. So we might be moving kind of zigzaggy, but I think we'll actually have a chance of getting somewhere now. Well we got stuck for a bit. We talked to a local who comes out here a lot and he said it's because it's low tide, but he said this is way lower than he even thought it would be. So that made us feel less stupid. Low tide is extra low in the winter as he said. So we got stuck. We had to kind of push ourselves with the oars through the mud, but I think things are looking up. This kayak trip is definitely not boring. It's not going very fast, but it's not boring. So after that last clip, something unexpected, very unfortunate happened. As we had mentioned in the video, the water was really really shallow and for the most part it was just all this like mud underneath. And so the occasionally the kayak would kind of scrape the mud a little bit, but we approached this area that we didn't know until it happened, but it was all sharp shells, like shell pieces, and our inflatable kayak popped. All of a sudden we were, you know, scooting along. We were like kind of like shoving, trying to shove it forward and all of a sudden I just felt something and then all of a sudden I saw bubbles coming out and air coming out from under me and yeah the hissing noise. We were like crap. Oh crap with some other expletives. So we were still, we were probably half a mile ish from where we needed to be to be back like on the road close to the van. So what we did is we got out of the kayak. Adam didn't have shoes on. I like cut up my feet too. So our feet are kind of bleeding because it's really sharp and we're trying to drag the kayak to this shell island. That's what we're calling it. It was just the water was so low it was like all the shells that had popped our kayak exposed. So we stood on that and we're like what do we do? So we called the police department first because that was Adam's suggestion. And then that decision too was like is this an emergency? I mean we're okay. We just don't know how we're going to get back. That was our only thing. We weren't hurt. We weren't in danger, in harm's way per se. We were just stranded. So there was no way to get back. There's no one around. So we called the police department. She said call me back or call 9-1-1 and I'll pick up so I can see your location. So we called 9-1-1. She picked up. Then she transferred us to the Coast Guard. Yeah, a branch of service. We were like oh god this is so embarrassing. Like never did we think we'd have to call the Coast Guard for help. So we do want to say like telling the story is kind of hard for us because we're pretty embarrassed. Very embarrassed. And just feel like idiots even though we didn't really do anything wrong. It was just bad luck I guess. There was no way to know the water level. Yeah. I mean I guess we could have, it probably would have told us the tide level of the ship channel right there that we had to go across. But other than that you probably wouldn't know in the, on the trail. Yeah. That we could find. So we talked to the Coast Guard. Very very nice. And then they transferred us to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Game Warden. Yeah. And so all together all of them figured out a plan to come rescue us. So basically our problem was is we're on this shell island and then we still had to get to the edge of the ship channel which is what we said earlier in the video that we were kind of nervous to cross because big boats go. We knew we had no way to get across the ship channel. That was the real big issue. So they told us to try to get out to the edge of the ship channel and then they pick us up at the ship channel because where we were was too shallow for them to come on a regular boat. They would, they had something but they said it would have been much more dangerous. It would have, they would have had to get some other kind of really shallow water type boat and it would have been tough. We would have been out there way longer. Yeah it would have been an all day thing instead of just a couple hours. So we walked out to the edge of the ship channel however as most of the ground was it was so muddy we just kept sinking in and getting stuck and it was really hard to get around. Then there's this couple fishing. They have two kayaks close to the edge of the ship channel where we needed to go. They finally kind of noticed we were in distress. Maybe we should have yelled. I don't know. They were like hey do you guys need help? We're like yes and so we were just so embarrassed. Yeah we just didn't know what to do. But to get to that point we like hopped between shell islands basically trudging through the mud and so we were at that one and that was kind of as far as we could get. We had another hundred or so feet to go but the water was getting much more deep and it was still super muddy so thankfully they turned around and offered some help. Yeah so the kayakers the guy got in his kayak and he kayaked out to us and then one of us sat on the tip of his kayak and he kayaked us to the edge of the ship channel so we can wait. One by one. Yeah so one by one so then we were waiting. Got to a safe spot at the edge of the ship channel. We're waiting for the game warden to come get us and then we saw those blue lights flashing. Waved them down and you know. They were very nice. They were very nice. They got us on the boat. They took us back to the van and here we are. Yeah we're just very thankful that the situation could have been much worse. I mean we could have been hurt. The weather could have turned bad. We're lucky we could have been further out. Cell service. We did have our Garmin on our deal. We had cell service so we didn't really need it but if we would have we would have used the SOS button. Having service though helped us so much because we could actually talk to someone and give them more instruction versus just pressing SOS and we're so thankful for the random kayakers that helped us out so if you ever see this thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you to the coast guard, to the police department, to game warden. Like oh gosh we were just so thankful we were able to get out of there in a pretty timely fashion but yeah so we weren't totally sure. We didn't really film any of it because we were just trying to focus on getting out of there and just like focusing on the task at hand which was get back to the van safely. We weren't even sure if we wanted to share this story because to be honest we're kind of embarrassed. We feel like idiots and we feel like people are going to call us idiots because of this and trust us anything bad you want to say to us like you should have done this you should have done that we've already said it to ourselves. We've already beat ourselves up. So don't beat us up we already know. We wanted to share this because we typically don't have many things go wrong in our videos or in our adventures and we just want to be honest like we didn't want to try to hide that this happened to us. It's kind of a big deal. It's something we'll we'll remember forever and we just wanted to share like the not fun things that happened too so and then hopefully someone can learn something from this. We've learned you know be extra careful with an inflatable kayak and yeah so that's how uh the day went. We didn't even get our dang money's worth out of it. Yeah. We said to ourselves three trips and it'll pay for itself. Second time out. Oh well. We're gonna replace the kayak because we do love it and we will not kayak in places like this in the future. We had more we wanted to do this weekend on our little coastal getaway but we're taking this as a sign to head back to Austin. So we're heading back now. We had planned to show some more things kind of in the Corpus area. Show you guys a two-story Whataburger. Which if you know what Whataburger is you know. But instead we just stopped at a regular Whataburger instead and we're just gonna treat it ourselves. Yeah we were like we deserve fries after this and onion rings. So we're heading back to Austin now and just gonna decompress the rest of the weekend. And yeah hopefully our next adventure will be less exciting. So the Padre Island National Sea Seashores. She sells seashells by the seashore. I think I think the game warden's stuck now. We're bad luck you guys.