Day 8 of the Aransas Morning Book Blog Tour provides a scrapbook of photos from Port Aransas:
These photos are just a few from a large group I took during a visit in January 2013. I kept them in front of me during much of the writing of Aransas Morning to help set the mood and keep me focused. While the story is set in a real town and some of the locations are real, others are not.
Sam’s trailer park is based on the very real On The Beach RV Park located on Access Road 1A near the beach about two miles south of the town center. Dave’s hotel is on the same road at Highway 361 and is where I stayed when I first met the man who became Sam. (See Chapter Break Blog for the inside story on that,) And the ferry to the island is absolutely real; it’s the only way to get to Port Aransas unless you circle around to Corpus Christi.
Other locations such as Shelly’s Dream Bean Coffee Shop and Allie’s bungalow are fictional but placed in approximate locations on a real map.
Of course, much has changed in Port Aransas since August 26 when Hurricane Harvey made a direct hit with wind speeds of 130 miles per hour. The storm is not covered in Aransas Morning but it will be a key factor in the sequel, Aransas Evening, to be published later this year.
Meanwhile, the people of Port Aransas and the surrounding area are working hard to recover, and we’re trying to help a little by donating proceeds from book sales to those efforts. Learn more about that — and how and where to buy a book — at Aransas Morning.