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"Tanker goes in the air. Tanker makes a big splash! Tanker goes in th..." Anyway, you get the idea.
This flight started off headed towards Houston until my evil flight instructor decided he was tired of the place and gave me the choice of Dallas or Corpus. I've been to Dallas, so south it was. We headed out around 5:30 PM and got back around 1 AM.
| Approaching the Gulf Coast shoreline! This shot is looking northeast over San Jose Island, which is due east of Rockport and about 35 nm northeast of Corpus Christi. |
| This is the "port" in Port Aransas as seen from the north. Since most of the bay is shielded from the gulf by a line of islands, any breaks in the line have a lot of muddy water flowing in or out through them. |
| This was a hotel or condominium that just happened to be under our path over the north end of Mustang Beach. So, we banked over and snapped a shot of the pier. |
| Sunset on Port Aransas looking, uh, west |
| There were oil terminals and refineries all over the place. I think the huge crane on the left could be fun if left unattended. "Tanker goes in the air. Tanker makes a big splash! Tanker goes in th..." Anyway, you get the idea. |
| We generally followed the northern half of the Corpus Christi Bay coastline to the airport. I'm 99% sure the ship channel here isn't a natural formation, which means a lot of mud was moved. |
| We got cleared for landing pretty far out, so we made straight to Runway 17 (very faint in the upper far right). As they got closer, we noticed that some of the towers were burning off exccess gas. They're called "Flare Towers" and are probably only a couple years away from being installed at Taco Bells across the southwest. |
| This was Bubba's Icehouse on Airline Rd. and 383, where we decided to have supper here after not finding any seafood restaurants, but only fast food and Chinese buffets. Of course a quick interrogation of the yellow pages or a local would have dulled our glaring ignorance of a place called Water Street. Still tasty, the burgers were as big as your face and the partially gelatinated non-dairy gum-based soft-serve was free. |
| Here's a shot looking north towards Austin from about over New Braunfels. |
| This is downtown Austin around midnight on a Friday morning. The Palmer Events Center is in the lower left and the UT campus in the in mid-upper mid-right The brightest part is the capitol and the dark area in the right is part of the aircraft's window. The picture's a little blurry because of a long exposure and it was midnight, dammit! |
| More of Austin at night. Right is north and you should be able to see where Guadalupe and Lamar come together around 51st Street. The regularly spaced line of lights in the upper left is MoPac. |