If you’re ever down in South Padre Island in the southern most city on the Texas coast and you’ve brought your overland vehicle, you’re in luck. There are about 20+ miles of beach that you can explore.
I stumbled upon it while looking at TripAdvisor under the ‘Things To Do’ listings under Beach Driving.
Typically, overlanding a Texas beach involves going to Padre Island National Seashore (PINS as we refer to it as) where there are 60 miles of navigable beach for anyone to enjoy. You pay $10 and are allowed to camp a maximum of 14 days until you have to leave for a minimum of 48 hours before returning.
https://www.nps.gov/pais/index.htm
There is spotty phone service, no facilities, no gas stations along the beach unless you go into Corpus Christi which isn’t too far away.
South Padre Island, which is another 3 hour drive South of Corpus is a beach town with the standard tourist attractions, restaurants, hotels, and gift shops. This trip was for the wife, so we stayed at a Holiday Inn Express on the main strip. A walk to the beach from the hotel was less than five minutes, we went to check out a sandcastle competition on Saturday.
Saturday morning I decided to go scout the beach access routes I saw on the map and take the main road State Park Road 100 all the way up north until it ended.
For a long stretch of road the sand has overtaken almost half the lane.
I found that Beach Access #6 was unmanned and the pay booth continued to be empty the entire weekend. The entrance to #6 had a lot of deep sand but I saw some cars on the beach. There was a sign that recommended 4x4 vehicles only. I had to head back to go pick up the wife to catch a boat for a Dolphin tour.
After a Dolphin tour in the bay and lunch we drove on some of the beach in the afternoon. We made it to the four mile marker and turned around to find a spot for the kid to play without being in the way of traffic.
Between Beach Access #5 and #6 were where most of the drive-in beach goers were. It was overly crowded and there were kids running around everywhere on a narrow path for cars/trucks to drive by. The beach was groomed enough to where cars could drive on it even though we did see a truck get its tire dug into the sand and had to get recovered Sunday night.
Sunday morning the wife wanted to just hang out in the hotel room and relax, so me and the kid went back to the beach to explore some more of the northern beach.
At the 4-mile marker there’s this section of beach that had me uneasy when we drove through it on Saturday. I turned around soon after crossing this because I did not know when high tide and low tide were. Once again on Sunday I made the same mistake of crossing this section without knowing when high and low tide were. Thankfully there was still phone service and I learned that high tide was at midnight and low tide would be at 3PM. We drove by a group of Texas Overland guys camping overnight with a Pirate flag right after this pass.
We drove until we got a little past the 8-mile marker before turning around. The sand was starting to get deeper and the section of driveable beach was starting to get narrower. Out of all things I saw out there, someone was camping in a Honda Fit out at the 7-mile marker. They had a Suburban with them so I’m pretty sure they were OK. We also saw a group of people horseback riding along the beach on the way back south.
A big difference I noticed between this beach and the beach at PINS was the amount of trash that washed up on shore. It was sad to see so much of our waste all along the beach for miles.
Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon I did not air down. Tire pressures were around 33-35 psi and there were some spots where I had to give it a little more gas to get going. Sunday morning I did air down to 25 psi and it was a lot cushier ride. I’ve taken my Cooper ST Maxx’s down to 20 psi before but I didn’t want to lose too much ground clearance in the sand.
Sunday evening we returned once again to fly a kite and enjoy the ocean breeze one last time before driving 12 hours home the next day. I took this shot right after the sun set somewhere behind the Jeep.
If you’re ever near the South Texas Coast, there’s plenty of beach for everyone. I’d recommend PINS if you’re primitive camping and South Padre if you want to stay at a hotel and see the dolphins. Both beaches had a large number of fishermen roaming up and down the beach looking for a fishing spot. The people were nice and it wasn’t too busy in South Padre in early October. Weather was in the 80's and was a little bit humid the first night but it got better before we left. It will probably be a while before we make it back down to South Padre, we’ll probably visit PINS once again sometime in the Spring.
I hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!