Danielle Blog

Sunrise at Port Aransas, TX

Last week, I was at Port Aransas, TX, near Corpus Christi on the eastern coast of TX, for vacation. I was with Texas Seestor (TS), Trainwreck (Tr), older niece (M) and younger niece (YN).

I had an exceptionally great time. Floating around, swimming, bouncing around, and playing in the pool for pretty much all day from 8:00am to 4 pm was just fantastic.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I am definitely a “water” when it comes to the whole water, air, earth, fire personality types. My dreams are usually water dreams, and I just love the feel of being in the water. I never dream about earth. If fire or air is in my dreams, it is usually a nightmare of some sort.

Anyway, mornings were usually a time when I sort of took care of M, because she and I both wake up early (6:00ish). Most mornings, I was only able to occupy here and allow TS and Tr to “sleep in” until 6:30, maybe closer to 7:00 if we were all lucky.
One morning after she woke me up at 5:00am, I really wanted to go out to the water and take photos of the sunrise. You might recall that last year, I was able to take sunrise photos every morning from our condo’s patio and I wrote a blog post this spring with a few of my best shots.

This year, due to the location of our room, I actually had to take more time to do it, because I had to take the boardwalk out to the beach to get shots.

But I love the boardwalk, because it allowed me to experience this interesting transition from condo and building to ocean. And on the way, I was walking past the dunes which were actually still green this year and not all dried out; I guess all of the rain they got a couple of weeks ago due to hurricane Andrew was actually helpful.

Here is the end of the boardwalk before I got onto the sand.

And then just as I was setting up my tripod at the bottom of the steps, this group of about 8 (or so) teenage girls dressed in white gauzy dresses start walking past me onto the beach. Right into the sunrise area.
ugh.
But the adult who was with them, with the big fancy camera, stopped and talked to me about how it was their last morning here and how the sunset the previous night didn’t work out. How she had to get them all up and ready by 6:00 am, blah, blah, blah. I was sort of sympathetic, but I also knew this might be my only morning to get out and take photos. She ended up saying that she’d try to keep them down the beach and out of my line of images. They were only partly successful. Thus, some of my photos do not have the sun actually centered. *sigh*

But, I caught the first glimmer of the sun over the clouds.

And one of my favorite parts is the sound of the seagulls calling out to each other over the background sound of the ocean waves.

Once the sun rose a little more, I decided to try to capture my joy in being out there. This required me to use the self-timer on my camera and to sort of guess where I needed to be in the photo.

For the first one, I only had the timer set at 10 seconds, because I didn’t check it ahead of time, and when I got out there, I realized that I’d left my shoes on. As I was trying to pull off my shoes, the camera snapped the shot.

oops.

setting it for 20 seconds worked out a bit better.

of course, when I ran back to the camera, there was that girl in the photo again.

it isn’t perfect, but it is all that I had energy for.

I realized it is quite difficult holding ones balance with ones arms raised in joy while not knowing when the waves were going to come in. Once a wave comes in and the water sucks back out, it is rather hard to keep ones balance.

Then attempts with the sun shining on me.

oops.

try again.

then back to the ocean and the birds and some close ups.

After some photos of the seaweed, I headed back.

It was a beautiful way to start the day. It made up for waking up at 5:00 am.

And then, after breakfast, it was back to the pool with M. We had it all to ourselves for about an hour.

It was really wonderful.