We took our RV to the BEACH… It didn't go well

You should have been coaching me the whole time, not just in the final moment, like we pull up and you give me a crash course. Okay, if I start to feel things slow down, hammer it. Got it. Keep it up, keep the momentum up. Those tires are dragging. That's not good. Look at that. We've been here for two minutes and we're already asking if we need help. We're going to fall asleep to the ocean waves. That's amazing. Yeah. Great view. That's a pretty concentrated area of shear, white in this area, and that lines up exactly with this tornado warning and with what we were seeing on the velocities. We'll check back in the morning. We will report back. Unless there's a tornado and then we'll... And then we'll show. I'll make sure I hit record. It's raining. That's shaking. I just want to have my shoes on. I want to have the dogs clipped to my body and all my things in my backpack on my back. That is shaking the RV. So this is going to be a brand new experience for us, full-time RVers for going on eight years and we've never been camping on a beach. And now we got a four-wheel drive, classy, so we got nothing to worry about. We're not going to get stuck. So we decided to try out Crystal Beach, which is pretty close to Galveston. Yeah. And this is like the eastern most free beach camping that you can get in like the Texas third coast area. We've literally been talking about camping on these Texas beaches since 2019. It better be everything we hyped it up for. As soon as you get down here on to Boulevard Peninsula, I mean, you're right on the water. This is right on the water. Yeah. This is a pretty drive and it's a really cloudy day. So imagine what it would be like if the sun was shining. Yeah. It looks a little windy out there too. Yeah. It's a Saturday, which breaks one of our cardinal rules. Not excited about that. Don't show up on the weekend, in the middle of the weekend, and it is Valentine's Day. So some might consider it a holiday weekend. Others might not. I don't know. I don't know if Valentine's Day gets couples out camping together on the beach. It could be romantic. Yeah. We've got to make sure the four-wheel drive works in this thing. You know, even if you don't need four-wheel drive to get on the beaches down here, because I know a lot of people take all types of rigs down here, it's still good to exercise your four-wheel drive in your RV. And since we've been in Florida for so long, we haven't been anywhere close to being able to do that. There's a park. Yeah. There's RV parks all over the place. This is starting to look like a little vacation beach area, isn't it? It's been a long day driving. It was a 400-mile day today. Too long. So we're going to go all the way to the very last beach access road, which is Retellion. Not sure how you pronounce that. But so far, what we're seeing is just a bunch of these colorful stilt vacation houses. I always get excited when we're in the 10-minute radius of our landing spot to see what really is in a 10-minute drive nearby. So this is kind of the heart of downtown. Not a whole lot going on. There's some bars, a few restaurants, a few businesses, Margaritaville RV Resort. That looks like a big one. That is massive. There is lots of people partying there. Can you trust her? Is she correct? She's wrong once in a while. Definitely feels like we're headed out to the middle of nowhere. No cattle guards. It's just like, yeah, going to any other boondocking spot. It's like you take a left off the main road, usually you go over the cattle guards and you go find a spot. Right. Yeah. We've never camped on the beach, so this is going to be weird. Are you nervous? Like a little bit. You know, not a lot. It's been a while since we've gotten little butterflies in the tummy, huh? Yeah. What could go wrong? What's that? Somebody's private driveway? No. Okay, here's the entrance. I see two port-a-potties. Okay, why don't we pull over to the right a little bit and assess which way we're going to go and how we're going to handle this. Okay. Yeah, I just want to check and see what the sign says out here. The sand is pretty hard packed. Couple port-a-potties. Says free to the left, parking pass to the right, Texas Beach Watch. Looks like a big storm cloud behind you. Uh-oh. Okay, so here's the plan. Does it look wide open for the taking? It does. I can't see what's around the corner, but I'm just going to have you put it in four-wheel high. Right now? Yeah. You just got to push the button. I've never done it before. And then we'll just drive up and head to the left with sand. Oh, yeah. You're going to give me some instructions? Yes. You want to stay on the... You should have been coaching me the whole time, not just in the final moment, like we pull up and you give me a crash course. You want to stay on the hard-packed sand, of course. Stay on the hard-packed sand. How do I know what that is? Because it's darker? If you see big ruts, it is darker. But if you see light sand with big, deep grooves, that's the soft sand. Well, I wasn't scared until now. If you feel the RV starting to bog down, keep your momentum and keep going. I'll keep my momentum. And try to steer out of the deep sand. Okay. If I start to feel things slow down, hammer it. Got it. You just push the button, I think. Oh, you don't turn it? Oh. Yeah. There you go. We're off to a great start. There you go. All right. We're... Just keep an eye on the dashboard. 4H is what you want to see. What would ever require the 4L? When you're really going slow and trying to... So, like, if you do get stuck in the sand... Yeah, you'd want to be in 4 low to kind of control the torque to get in and out. But I don't ever switch it into 4L unless we actually come to a complete... We're stuck, then we switch it at that point. Yeah. I got to get all my bases covered. Yeah. All right. I'm going to walk off the... And we're not going to disconnect the toad. This was risky sand. We'd probably disconnect, but I think we're going to be okay. Watch out for the deep stuff. This is like a cruel joke making me do this. There we go. Yeah, this stuff out here is pretty hard packed. I think we're going to be okay, but the sun decided to come out for us. Well, this should be pretty fun. Hopefully there's room for us. I see a lot of people on the beach so far. The dogs like it. They always love it when we get to the ocean. It's pretty safe out here. It felt safe. I felt it slow down a little bit, you know, coming up from asphalt to sand, but it wasn't like ripping, dragging, or anything. Towing that chunky Bronco with those big tires and meaty treads, like, that's a little bit of a wait. No problem. So this is all hard packed? The closer you get to the dunes, the more soft it is. We should also pay attention to the tide, right? Is this high tide or low tide? The closer you get to the water, the softer it gets, so you want to stay right in the middle. It's beautiful here. What do you think? What's your first impression? It's, well, wide open. It's kind of cool. I feel like it's beautiful. Somebody was out here having fun. Yeah. Cool little rig. Oh my God. Oh my. Did you see that coming? Did you? No. Oh, it gave me a mini heart attack. Let's go up a little bit. We might go in between these two rigs up here. That's a big, that's a big class A and a travel trailer. Yeah. What else did we see? We saw a truck camper. We saw a Navion. So what's that, like a B plus considered? A little bit of everything out here. A little bit of everything. Yeah. These guys might just be staying one night. Because there are jeeps hooked up? So on the turnaround, just be kind of careful. You can kind of see, I would just keep the momentum up. That's all I can say. Just keep the momentum up. I want to go out and record this thing. That's such great advice. Thank you. Yeah. Stay away from the water and stay away from the dunes. You got this, Cress. You don't need me. Like you said, what's the worst that could happen? Exactly. Just going to check out some of this. Looks pretty good. Ah, I think this should be okay. Keep it up. Keep the momentum up. All those tires are dragging. That's not good. Look at that. So the sand kind of caught the tires and all right, you did a good job, babe. Is there a butt coming? I feel like there's a butt. There's a little problem. So those big grippy tires caught the wet sand on the Bronco and they turned sideways and they stayed that way. That's why I felt the drag. So this Dynamax was so powerful. Yeah. Just drug the Bronco. I'm sure that's good for the axles. Yeah. I don't think it's going to hurt it too much, but. So maybe we should have disconnected it. I think on the turnaround. Yeah. Okay. So I'm just going to disconnect now and then we can space ourselves a little bit. But I did good. Thank you. You did great. I'm excited to be here. I'm like oversimulated now. Yeah. This will be cool. Yeah. It just kind of stuck and turned that way. That was kind of weird. I'm surprised they didn't like straighten out once she started coming straight, but they just stuck that way and she started plowing through the sand. I hope we didn't mess anything up. Didn't look too good dragging the Bronco like that. Sure it didn't enjoy that. When I got in the steering wheel was kind of stuck sideways. So yeah, we're good. Thank you. Friendly people. We've been here for two minutes and we're already asking if we need help. Rookies. Okay. So we're going to disconnect the Bronco and then we'll get situated with the RV. Sun's going to set. It's supposed to rain tonight too. Hopefully it doesn't rain too much. Okay. This is going to be interesting. Toe bar is kind of bound up with how we're sitting. Yeah. And hopefully we didn't bend anything or break anything. Dragging this thing, just trying to see if I can unbind these things a little bit. Yeah. There we go. That helped. Oh, come on. I'm spying on Aaron using our rear view camera and it looks like he's having a hard time getting these bars off. I need to get a little rubber mallet. That's on my list. Something to pound these pins out when they're just being a pain. There's this release lever that's supposed to release the tension or the bind that toe bars get. They call them non-binding toe bars, but every once in a while they still bind up. Do you need help? Yeah. There's just a little bit of weird like tension on that sideways. Yeah. Watch this pin. It should go like straight instead of crooked and then you can just pull it right out. Okay. It's going to go forward like an inch. All right. Yay. We got it. It doesn't look bent or anything. Yeah. I've had it stick before on flat ground. That was just a bad situation. So when we go remote places, we should get some backup stuff for all of this. Yes. Note to self. Don't do a U-turn in the sand while towing. Yeah. Disconnect before we turn. Next, we're just going to get all leveled up. Yep. We're at the beach. This is going to be sandy. Should I put the rug out? Yes. Yeah. So we chose to put our windows on the water side. Yeah. I mean, we don't know. We've never done this before. I see people set up both ways. They have their patio facing the water. Yeah. They have their patio facing the water, but we're not really patio people. We're more like sitting in our big... You can work all day tomorrow. I do need to work all day tomorrow. I like to work with a view. It's going to be sandy. Yeah. It is going to be sandy. I think just putting this out is going to help immensely. This is actually called the Sand Free Mat, and that's what they were originally designed for was the beach. Yeah. So they do pretty good. You probably just need to weigh it down, right? We might need to weigh it down a little bit. They actually don't blow too much because they have holes. Let me just see if we have to move first. Okay. We're actually not too far off. We're obviously tilting down a little bit towards the ocean. The driver's side is down. Yeah. But it's only like two to four inches, so I'm just going to put the buckets down and level us up. Actually, babe, you'll want to fire it back up. Yeah. Okay. We'll see how well these buckets do in the sand, if they help or hurt. They are sinking. Definitely softer on the patio side. Is it okay? Yeah. It's just sinking a little bit. I think we're going to drive up on some ramps or something. Okay. That's Chris's very nervous face. I'm nervous. Do we need to go more that way? No, I think we're fine. Because we're... I checked the high tide. The high tide is nearly here. Yeah. I think we're okay. We're just going to... I don't know if this is going to work or if these are going to get sunk down. We're just going to try it. Keep going. Stop. Perfect. E-brake is going on. That should help us get leveled up. Okay. I don't know why I'm so nervous right now, but I am. It's something about sand and sinking and you've never done this before. I mean, definitely seeing the other people here, especially in the same line, that makes me feel better. I'm sweating. I'm working a little bit out there. I don't know if that was a smooth start, babe. Well, I wouldn't say so. Makes me all sorts of nervous. Yeah. I don't know. I wouldn't probably classify that as a smooth start, but we're here. We made it. Our first time beach camping. Look at the view. Yeah. It makes me... Well, I get nervous about everything in general. You do. We're going to have a fun summer, babe. It's going to be all types of wild camping. This is just warming you up. Oh, man. Ooh. Yeah. Beautiful, huh? Yeah. We're going to fall asleep to the ocean waves. That's amazing. Yeah. Great view. It's a great view. I waved to the neighbor. I already made contact. We got a friendly neighbor. Oh, that's good. A little safe beach community. Now you just got to take the Bronco on a little whipty whip. It actually started kind of weird. It did not like being drug around the beach. Well, I wouldn't imagine. Yeah. Do you feel the humidity? I feel it. Does my hair? Yeah. Your hair feels it. Usually that's my... That's how I check. I look in the mirror. Yeah, I'm feeling it. I think I feel humidity. Well, it's cold. I have like three layers on. It's cold and windy and humid all at the same time. We're just going to take the Bronco for a little spin and make sure everything's good with that. Some pretty big tracks. Sand is a little bit softer than I expected. But again, that's probably just these big old meaty tires. So this is just two wheel drive. The Bronco we have has the four wheel automatic, which I kind of like. That way if you ever get caught in snow or situations where it might be dry pavement and then also possibly slippery, just put it in auto and forget about it. So this is the end of the free beach camping, I think. Caution washout area. Oh, I guess it must be more free camping up here. There's people driving across the little washout area. We might do that depending on how deep that is. Oh! Oh yeah. Let's get some of those done. So this is the other side where we first came in, where it says you need a permit to come camp. Looks pretty much the same as where we're at. Not too many people down here. Maybe it's a little less packed down here. So I guess that would kind of make sense. But how fun is this to be driving along the ocean on the beach, camping on the ocean on the beach? Chris is a little nervous though. There she is. Gotta say, the Dynamax looks pretty good in the sand. Not bad. So the Bronco cruise went awesome. That thing, I didn't feel like I was going to get stuck anywhere. You didn't have anything blowing up on you, blinking or dinging or being angry? Nope. No weird lights. Luckily that sand out there is very soft and we only drug it like 25, 30 feet. That could be bad news in the wrong scenario. I mean, you obviously don't want to drag a vehicle. With the wheels. I don't know what happened. It's like the steering wheel locked sideways when the big wheels turned in the sand and they got stuck. They're so aggressive tread, it just kept grabbing on the sand and turning sideways. So I don't know. Lesson learned. That's how you learn. You learn by watching our mistakes. We are rusty on this boondocking. We've been in Florida for six months it feels like. Oh, that's our least favorite thing about Florida is that you get stuck in RV parks for so long and we can only handle that for so many weeks in a row until you gotta just rip on out of there. You said you checked the Tide app? I did actually. That was the very first thing. So the Tide, let's talk about that for just a minute. That's another one of the many things that I paid zero attention to before becoming an RVer. And then once you're an RVer, or if you live by the ocean obviously, but coming from Minneapolis, I didn't pay attention to the Tide. You didn't have that on your home screen? It was not on my radar. So as soon as we pulled up here and you were out there working your ass off, you know, I try to do some things to contribute. If anything, just give me peace of mind. So I know that there's free apps for the Tide. So just like downloading it from the cloud, because it's been so long since I've used it. Yeah. We know from our beach walks, like you gotta pay attention to the Tide. So you know. So you don't get trapped. So you don't walk out on the beach and then get trapped by the high tide and have to stand up on a rock for hours. Or when it's just nice to walk on the beach too. So when we pulled up and parked, it was in the three o'clock hour. And this app says that the high tide today, there's two of them. One is at 421 PM, less than 10 minutes from now. And so that made me feel really good knowing that, okay, we basically drove up one hour away from high tide, which gave me a very safe feeling knowing that we were in a safe zone. And that looks like, I don't know, a hundred feet or something. It's big. But it is, it is something to pay attention to not only for parking your RV, but also if you were to drive off and then the high tide comes and you can't drive back on, you know, that's a problem. Especially if you have kids or pets that you leave behind and you can't get to them. You really have to think about these things. I think that's why this is a good camping beach though, is because it's so wide and the tide I don't think goes up to the dunes very often. Yeah. So this is it. This is nearly high tide. Beautiful view. Yeah. Saturday night, February, middle of February, not busy at all. And the weather's kind of nice. So I would imagine in the summertime, this place gets crazy. Yeah. And can you imagine it like in the peak weather? Oh yeah. It's a little cold now, but like 4th of July weekend. It's a little cold and windy, but I think tomorrow, I don't know if tomorrow will be a little warmer or not. We'll see. Well, we better get those doggies on their little walk. It's four o'clock, all day travel day. I'm ready to put my feet up and relax after our little walkie. Good job. Good job driving today. Thank you. We made it. Happy Valentine's Day. We're safe and sound. Yes. Got our water bucket for the dogs because they're going to get sandy. Okay. Hey. Doing. Wee. It's quite nice. So I popped open my weather app and it said tornado watch. There are certain things that you take for granted in a house prior to RVing. Electricity is one of them. Plumbing is one of them. Having septic in a flushing toilet is one of them. Four hard walls that can withstand a storm is one of them. Tornadoes are a tough one because those like kind of pop up, but I have never heard of a tornado watch on the water like this. We knew it was going to rain a little bit. It seems weird. Are we in a hurricane zone? We're in both. We're in the Venn diagram where you have hurricanes, you have tornadoes, and then you have this little space in Texas, which I believe is susceptible to both. And you know, luckily it's just a watch, not a warning, which warning is the worst of the two. And the warning goes until nine o'clock PM, which right now we're creeping up on six PM. So it's going to start raining here in about an hour, within the hour. And then the worst of it's going to be seven, eight, nine PM. If we can make it through that, we can get a good night's sleep and all is well. We'll check back in the morning. We will report back. Unless there's a tornado and then we'll... And then we'll show. I'll make sure I hit record. We've been waiting, literally we're in our eighth year of wanting to come camp on this beach and here we are. This is a special view. This is a special view, a special place. You can't beat this right here. Yeah. Life is good. Sunset. I'm just peeking out here. It's pretty. Doesn't look like a tornado is coming. Calm and peaceful on this side. A little bit of a sunset. See that's a pretty, that's a pretty concentrated area of sheer whiteness. This area and that lines up exactly with this tornado warning and with what we were seeing on the velocities. We're right here. Actually want to jump in and look at some of our galaxies. We brought the slides in. We're listening to the tornado warning. It was eerily calm like two minutes ago and now here's the rain and the wind. It's going to pass in like 10 minutes, but we're just trying to be ready. We have our go bags ready. We have the dogs ready. It's just like, I don't know where we would go. Like we're on the beach. Like there's nowhere to go. Okay. We've actually got a reporter on this train right now. If you can hear me, just describe what things are looking like right, uh, right now down here. Just the past 30 seconds, the rain has started to fall. It was only just a little bit windy. That whole time. Oh, there's Mardi Gras in Galveston. The RV is starting to shake now a little bit. It's going to pass quick. I think we're going to be okay. watching the parade, you can see some of them brought their umbrellas. Most people were prepared for this storm. That's shaking. I just want to have my shoes on. I want to have the dogs clipped to my body and all of my things in my backpack. That is shaking the RV. See, the rain is just torrential down there right now. The parade is still going on. Torrents of rain and gusty winds down on the island, and they are still under the severe thunderstorm warning. This is actually goes down until 8.15. They extended it. So no rest for the weary in Galveston. The good news though is that they've dropped all the tornadoes that have touched down. It's now just a base severe thunderstorm warning. I feel bad for the truck camper out there babe. It's raining it looks wet out there like it's a lot lighter it's a lot lighter it's still it's still windy out here it looks like it's a little wet it's it's raining but it's calming down well I think that's it I think we're clear yep it passed look at Louie looking at that beefsteak he was just staring we're clear clear it's it was such a it was so weird like it was a regular-looking thunderstorm that was gonna pass through in 10 minutes and then all of a sudden people are talking about tornadoes it's just crazy I feel so wiped out right now from going through that like the whole second that the forecast changed from you know watch to warning to it's gonna be here in 10 minutes to oh nobody should be on the strip right now you know yeah that got a little crazy got a little dramatic and rightfully so you have to be safe and just getting the bags together getting the dogs together getting like you and me like what is it that ultimately you need to do well the crazy thing is we're on a beach with no shelter this RV is the most shelter on this beach for us right now like if a tornado hit that quickly we had we have nowhere to go like even if we got in the Bronco and started driving I didn't know where to go I don't know which way is the better way like are you driving right into it like where where do you go to so that was crazy yeah ever wonder where the name Irene iron travels comes from it's actually named after my online fitness and nutrition coaching business Irene iron fitness I help people move better feel better and eat better with strength training and real food no fad diets no harsh restrictions no counting calories and absolutely no processed food in a package if you want to get stronger and feel better at any age check the description below for the links with my new clients special or join in on our next and upcoming group challenge