Leaving Houston for Salt Air
Living in Houston can feel like living inside a gas tank.
You drive to eat.
You drive to meet friends..
You drive to walk.
You drive to escape driving.
When you work from home, the days blur even faster. Screens glow. Groceries cost more than they should. Dinner becomes the event because what else is there? And somehow, even while doing “nothing,” money keeps leaving.
We realized we weren’t bored. We were craving space.
So we went to Port Aransas for the weekend.
No packed schedule. No overpriced cocktails. No rushing. Just a beach house to ourselves and salt in the air.
It was quiet.
We rode a golf cart down sandy streets like teenagers with nowhere urgent to be. We parked by the water and let the day stretch. We explored without an itinerary. We took photos of things that weren’t landmarks. Just sky, landscape and each other. We let the wind ruin our hair and didn’t care.
Instead of spending money to fill time, we filled time with living.
We cooked. We read. We watched movies without scrolling. We woke up without alarms. The beach became our third space! Free, wide open, asking nothing from us except that we show up.
Back in Houston, everything feels monetized. Out there, the tide comes in and out whether you paid for dinner or not.
It made me realize how much of our “city life” spending isn’t about desire, it’s about friction. When nature is far, when community spaces are scarce, when everything requires parking and planning, consumption becomes the easiest activity.
But at the coast, we remembered something simple:
We don’t need much.
Just water.
And a little wind.
In Between
We didn’t plan a whole day around it. It was one of those “we have an hour or so, what should we do?” kind of decisions. So we drove over to the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens and just… wandered. No agenda. No pressure to capture everything. Just a few minutes to breathe.
The gardens felt like a quiet pocket tucked inside the city. Sunlight slipping through trees, shadows stretching across walkways, leaves doing that soft rustling that sounds like permission to slow down. We took a few photos—windows framing green, doorways leading into light, old rooms that felt like they were still holding stories in their walls. I loved how everything looked like it was meant to be looked at slowly.
Then it was back to real life. Laptops open at Brasil, coffee cups sweating onto the table, Wi-Fi reconnecting us to responsibilities. We worked remotely, half focused, half still thinking about the gardens. I caught myself wishing I’d taken more photos, like I could somehow make the moment last longer if I documented it better.
But maybe that’s okay. Maybe some moments aren’t meant to be fully archived. Maybe they’re just meant to be felt, briefly, in between emails and refills of coffee.
Houston keeps surprising me like that—little pockets of beauty squeezed into ordinary days. And I think that’s what I’ll remember most: not the perfect shots I didn’t take, but the feeling of having a few quiet minutes in the middle of a busy life.
