Fun In The Sun Baytown Texas

My bride and I loaded up my awesome 2011 Cosmos Blue Jeep JKU Sport and our doggies for a day of adventure and headed east on I-10 for Anahuac, Texas - which spell check identified as Nahuatl, which I suspect was the original language over there.  I know it is in Channelview.  We stopped at the entrance to the Wallisville Lake Project to grab a geocache (GC36NMH), but it was in pieces.  I logged it as a find and alerted the cache owners, TxDwight and TxJoAnn56.

We briefly perused the fruit stand at I-10 and FM563, but decided we would buy from the other stand at High Island, later in the day.  We decided to make another stop at the Jackson Cemetery in Anahuac, as there is a geocache there also, called "Thriller" (GC33KBD). 

My bride is a descendant of the Barbers and the Barrows and we found a goodly number of gravestones of a branch of the Barrow family.

While I searched for the tiny geocache we let the dogs explore and my bride looked for kin folk's grave stones.  If you are interested in learning about geocaching, the Baytown area has over 300 "caches" hidden and the number is growing every day.  It's a wonderful family and kid-friendly activity and will take you to obscure parks, cemetery's and generally get a person off the couch.

A branch of the Barrow Family are buried at the Jackson Cemetery in Anahuac, Texas

When we returned home, I went on the Internet to ancestry.com and could not link these folks with my wife's side of the family.  She is a direct descendant of Daniel Barrow and Ruby Amanda Barber and not this line. I photographed the headstones and submitted the pictures on findagrave.com for those who research this kind of stuff.  Its actually very popular and my brother TJ Bustem and sister Connie Byrd are heavily involved.

I call my Jeep Wrangler "tha Choppa" as it takes me anywhere I want to go, like a helicopter. "Get to the Choppa!"

We headed for a hike and a drive through the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge to see if we could see some gators, but it was already very hot and we were unsuccessful. If you want to see wildlife, I advise going 60 miles south to Brazos Bend State Park instead.

At the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, we walked the boardwalk.

The last time I was down on this beach and what is left of SH-87, was about 10 years ago with the Baytown Chapter of the TX4X4 Cyber Club, now defunct, with the Boyd brothers, Bruce and Marshal.  Bruce was the President of our chapter and was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident on SH-146 in late 2003.  I haven't seen Marshal in a long time, although I talked to Bruce's wife the other day.  We led a group of over 120 Jeeps and 4-wheel drive trucks to Sabine Pass over the destroyed road.  The man at the fruit stand remembered the event.  I turned leadership of the whole club, which I founded, over to someone else and it is now called TX4WD.

The 25 mile stretch of road-beach between High Island and Sabine Pass.

The tide was in, along with a heavy stinky kelp deposit, which ran for miles.  The coastline is replete with trash and plastic and looks terrible, but this stretch of the coastline has never been pretty to me and others.  Hurricane Ike rearranged it considerably and the state has cut an alternate path inland, which due to the debris and oil-laden sand on the coast, forced us up onto it.  It's still very much a 4-wheel drive trail though, so beware if you think you can do it in your Zephyr.  We had a Chevy truck follow us for about 4 slow miles before they finally decided it was too risky and turned back.  Charles Goss and I rescued a man and his truck here one time who had been stuck for 18 hours.

Just for fun I drove up on a fallen log.

If I was going to "wheel" this beach, I would have aired my tires down and disconnected my sway-bars, but we were the Lone Ranger out here and it is never a good idea to wheel alone.  There are still plenty of obstacles, logs, giant chunks of asphalt, boggy quicksand, and debris to "crawl" over though - just don't do it alone.  My next beach run will be down south to Matagorda and 30 miles of pretty danged good beach.  The best though are North and South Padre Island.  I call this stretch of beach we are on, HISP.  High Island to Sabine Pass and it is pretty much boring and ugly, but in Texas, where most everything is private property, a person has to go to what is available if they want to test their machines against the terrain.