Happy Birthday, Anthony!
This year I'm remembering birthdays past...
June 9th, 2017-We were in South Padre Island, TX celebrating your 60th birthday. We stayed at a cool old hotel in Port Isabel and drove up the peninsula a ways from South Padre where we found this beach that we could drive out on. I couldn't get the picture to paste, but in it you were looking out of the passenger window a second before, you hid just as I took the pic, lol. Such a brat! The beach was amazing, and the company unbeatable, but the local radio stations only played tejano music. That didn't stop us. We spent several days rocking out in Spanish. We drug ourselves away from the beach later for our evening fishing charter. We went fishing in the bay, and you (of course) caught all the fish. I didn't even catch one. You had a bunch on your stringer, but you left it hanging over the side of the boat when we headed back to port. We laughed when we realized that there we only a couple left on it we we landed. It was such fun. I knew that you were hurting after all of our activity and desperately needed rest, but you never complained. That's just the way you were... always smiling through the pain.
We wandered all the way back up the coast, staying in dive hotels in Port Aransas and wherever we felt like spending more time fishing and swimming. I wish I could post the picture I took of you fighting a pelican who was trying to steal the shrimp you bought to use at bait. That one was priceless! We ate wonderful, fresh seafood at various little restaurants along our route, and we got to see everything along the coast for one last time before Hurricane Harvey took its toll a short time later. I took a ton of pictures, but they accidentally got deleted when I was trying to download them to my computer. I plan to take my phone into the AT&T store and see if they can find them somehow. If they recover them I will post them here.
If I'd have known that this would be our last time there, I would not have changed one moment of our trip. (Not even the panicked stop we made at the border check station. I'll leave that up to the imagination for now...) Every second was perfect. Always was... I told my friends "I can't feel my face when I'm with Champ". There was never a truer statement.
Memories like these sustain us now that you are gone. They cause us to smile secret smiles and laugh to ourselves when we remember times like these with you. We only regret the things we didn't do, and there wasn't much that you and I didn't do. Ha! Life was a grand adventure. I will always love you, Anthony. Thanks for making my life extraordinary for so many years! I was blessed to be loved by you....