Texas Gulf Coast: Warm and wild
By: By TRACY BARNETT, Houston ChronicleYou've already walked the beach and picked up more shells than you know what to do with. You've built a sand castle, eaten buckets of fried shrimp and sipped a margarita on the deck overlooking the waves. What next?
There's plenty to fill your itinerary on the Texas coast, no matter which spot you choose.
Port Aransas
The Port Aransas Museum gives new life to a turn-of-the-century "kit house," the type that you could order out of a Sears catalog and assemble yourself. This one was home to several families and survived the 1919 hurricane before becoming a Coast Guard outpost and then a family home again. The home was abandoned and listed as one of the state's most endangered places by Preservation Texas in 2007 before locals rallied to save it, move it to its current location and turn it into a museum showcasing local history (1-361-749-3800).
Newport Dunes Golf Club, a new Arnold Palmer-designed course, is the Gulf Coast's only seaside golf course. The links-style course overlooking the sea harks back to golf's origins in Scotland and England with its minimalist style, rolling greens and fairways and stacked-wall bunkers, says general manager Kevin Michael (1-361-749-4653; www.newportdunesgolf.com).
The Wetlands Education Center features a 3 1/2-acre salt marsh, an extensive boardwalk system and an observation deck. A 45-minute tour is offered twice a week (1-361-749-6729; www.utmsi.utexas.edu).
Corpus Christi
Last year the world-class Texas State Aquarium unveiled Tortuga Cay, an endangered sea turtle sanctuary with above- and below-water viewing stations. The year before, it was the Wild Flight Theater, putting a talented crew of rehabilitated raptors onstage. This spring, the aquarium will finish Conservation Cove with the new Eagle Pass, a naturalistic outdoor habitat for the theater's birds of prey like Cowboy, the crested caracara and Gus, the white-tailed hawk (1-800-477-4853; www.texasstateaquarium.org).
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