Tuesday, February 1st, 2006 - Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Texas.

Since it dawned dark and cloudy, we decided to do some shopping and maybe some laundry if we found a Laundromat along the way. Our fresh water tank was running low, so Monika had the bright idea of buying a collapsible water bottle so that we could refill the tank without having to move the trailer. Taking the trailer to get some water generally involves the folderol of hooking it up, towing it to the water tap, repositioning it at the site when it's full, and then disconnecting everything. Thus, filling a bottle to bring the water to the trailer would be much less hassle. I was also still trying to find some solar panels to help recharge our trailer battery. Our first try was a Wal-Mart Super center in Corpus Christi where we immediately found the folding water bottle, but no solar cells. Since we were already on the west side of town, we decided to curl around the bay to the north where Monika had found the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on a map of the Gulf Coast.

The road to the wildlife refuge wandered all over the map, but we persevered and finally drove in late in the afternoon. The Visitor Center had some nice exhibits including beautiful examples of some of the Whooping Cranes for which the wildlife refuge is famous. Beautiful examples of other native fauna, up to and including alligators, were also nicely exhibited in settings mimicking their native habitat.

But for me the most valuable exhibit of all was a small section of simulated beach with all the local shells displayed and carefully labeled. We had some labeled line drawings of the shells, but line drawings cannot adequately convey the color, texture, and 3-dimensional shape that really describe a shell. The display gave me the chance to correctly identify some of the shells we had already collected and have a database of labeled color pictures of ones that we still might encounter.

From the visitor center we drove down the park road to a 100-foot high observation tower in the hopes of getting a view of a whooping crane. From tower we spotted several deer that acted almost tame, some Great Egrets, and a 500-year old Live Oak, but no whooping cranes (strike one!). From the observation tower we continued on a one-way road that looped into the interior of the refuge. There we saw a "controlled burn" area and plenty of circling buzzards, but again no whooping cranes (strike two!).

Rejoining the main road just south of the Visitor Center, we decided to walk the Heron Flats Trail. The trail led us to a blind where we looked out over the tidal flats, but once again we didn't see any whooping cranes (strike three!) and we gave up on that. Still, there were other waterfowl and it was a nice path so we continued to wander along. Suddenly I saw two eyes and a nose just above the surface of one of the ponds, and I said to Monika, "That's an alligator!" She scoffed at first, but then when we saw it slowly come toward us and then suddenly submerge, she became convinced. Since there were obvious side trails from the pond to the trail we were walking on, I became just a tiny bit nervous about the possibility of an alligator lumbering up onto the path and trying to make a dinner out of us.

We hustled on past the pond and curled back toward the truck when we found yet another small pond, but this one had an observation platform and a telescope. Assuming perhaps rashly that alligators would not climb up stairs to get a us, we stopped to look around. I saw a group of waterfowl on a tidal flat about 1/4 mile away, and when Monika turned the telescope that way she saw what looked like whooping cranes! I also took a look and verified that they were extraordinarily large birds--they made the ducks look like midgets in comparison--and had both the red patch on the top of their heads and the black crescent-shaped stripe just behind the beak. However, the plumage of these birds was slightly brownish rather than the pure white and that really implied that they were sand hill cranes rather than whooping cranes (strike four!). Still, it was fun to at least have had a good look at the wildlife refuge and its denizens, so we were content to return to our truck and drive back to camp for the night.

When we returned to camp we were greeted by the symphony of many generators, each with its own pitch. After perforce listening to a variety of generators in the campground and studying the lifestyle of the corresponding RV owners, I can modestly offer Uncle Bob's Guide to Noisy Neighbors. Essentially the Nuisance Value (NV) of each neighbor is the product of their Need for Electricity (NE) multiplied by the Noise of their Generator (NG). In short, using the magic formula NV = NE x NG will give you a good idea how irritating each of your neighbors will be in an unimproved campground such as Malachite Beach.

The Need for Electricity can be closely estimated by how extravagantly the RV uses electricity for lighting and non-essential purposes like entertainment. For lighting, use the following scores:

• 0: use no lights at all or only battery powered lanterns
• 1: use only fluorescent or LED lights
• 2: use the standard RV incandescent lighting

For entertainment, the best marker variable is how much the use their TV, and for that you can assign the following scores:

• 0: no sign of a TV or deployed TV antenna
• 1: the TV antenna on top of the RV is popped up
• 2: they have deployed a satellite TV dish

You find the NE index for your neighbor simply by adding the lighting and TV scores.

Next you need to find the Noise of their Generator. Given our experience, the noise level can be specified by the following levels:

• 0: no generator of any kind or a completely silent generator like solar cells
• 1: a really quiet external generator like the "Honda 2000" model, which we could barely hear from the next campsite.
• 2: a motor homes with a built-in generator (one motor home generator was fairly quiet but most of them were rather noisy, about the same as a typical lawnmower)
• 3: a big generator with an attached gasoline engine of 5 or more horsepower, typically mounted in a big metal frame (those reverberated down the campground when they were running).

So if you are next to someone who uses standard RV incandescent lighting, has set up a satellite TV dish, and has a whopping 7-horsepower generator mounted in the bed of their pickup, you are going to have a really noisy neighbor with a Nuisance Value of 12. Conversely, someone with no TV who uses fluorescent lights and has a Honda 2000 generator would be a nice neighbor with a Nuisance Value of only 1. With a little bit of practice, you can use Uncle Bob's Guide to Nuisance Neighbors when you enter a new campground to decide where you might want to place your rig.

It occurred to me that some RV campers with generators are a lot like smokers in that they were addicted to having large amounts of power for daily life and willing to pollute everyone else's territory to get it. In this case the pollution was noise pollution rather than air pollution, but I think the principle remains the same. Our new neighbor that day used incandescent lighting and deployed a satellite TV dish, and he kept the generator in his motor home roaring right up to the nightly curfew of 10 p.m. At Big Bend National Park the non-generator hours were from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., giving us a much longer window for getting a decent night's sleep, and they also had about 1/2 of the campground that was declared as a "no generator use" zone, kind of like the "no smoking" zones in restaurants and such. Malachite campground's quiet hours were only from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and of course some Bozos kept their generators on until 10 and others started theirs up promptly at 6 a.m. in the morning, so we often were limited to 8 hours of quiet time per night to try to get a good night's sleep.