Ok, sorry it's taken so long, been really busy at work n junk. Here are some pics from Topless Day 2015 at Crystal Beach!
We left on Friday afternoon to head to the beach. I took the back seats out for the trip (first time for that!) and we managed to get quite a bit of stuff in the Jeep with plenty of room to spare!
As we headed to Galveston it started raining. I really wanted to take top down / doors off for the trip so we wouldn't have them to mess with on Topless Day, but rain was in the forecast (we were only hoping it wouldn't rain all weekend!) so we left it on. We did have to keep the doors on (didn't want to try to lay them in the tent or anything once we got there) but we did manage to take the top off. Anyway, on our way into Galveston we had a lovely rainbow to greet us!
I thought this was funny. Our Garmin showed us as being in the water (we were on the Bolivar Ferry).
We started seeing Jeeps in Galveston and many more once we got to the Ferry. We stopped for some last minute supplies and saw some tricked out Jeeps at the store as well. We started getting excited! So we finally get to the beach and ... nothing. Well, nothing much anyway. A few Jeeps here and there cruising up and down the beach, but not the huge spectacle we expected. We drove down a ways, decided there was nothing going on, then turned back and headed the other way looking for a good camping spot - one that was flat and fairly far from the water. Then, we, uh, found it!
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| Those hammocks are hanging off a thing that connects to a tow hitch. Totally getting one of those. |
We found the party. These pics don't really do it any justice at all, it was absolutely nuts. Jeeps parked on top of Jeeps, people standing around getting wasted, you had to be really careful not to run over anyone! To my knowledge no one did get run over for the entire event, which is both good and a little surprising.
We made our way through the madness and down a little ways and found a great camping spot. We set up our tent, again as always while in the dark (though we had a lantern this time!), and built a fire. We were better prepared on that front as well (as opposed to my last beach camping post).
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| Better fire this time! |
Here is our tent set up in the daylight. We had a nice little canopy shelter we picked up that we absolutely love. It gave us a nice place to sit in the shade and watch the oncoming madness.
So what is Topless Day all about? Jeeps. It's like a parade! We sat back and watched Jeeps cruise back and forth for hours. And hours. And hours. All day and most if not all night Jeeps just parade back and forth. Here are some pics for you.
It was really awesome to see all the tricked out Jeeps. My wife and I got some ideas as to what we want to do with ours, and she's come around to concede that we need a lift! Yay! haha There was a guy selling flags and we bought one, so we did trick our rather stock Jeep out a little for the event.
It's hard to describe how many Jeeps were there. Forecasts were for 2000-4000 Jeeps. I would say there were probably about 5 miles worth of Jeeps parked really close to each other side by side in two or sometimes 3 rows. It was pretty crazy.
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| Don't know if you can tell but it goes back as far as you could see - and this was just in one direction |
So in addition to watching the Jeep parade we got to go swimming, met some cool people, and generally just lazed about the beach. It was a lot of fun and we intend to go back for sure. Next time with a more personalized Jeep to show off hopefully!
Night time didn't stop the insanity. In fact it bumped it up several notches. My wife and I aren't partiers, so maybe we're not really cut out for the Jeep community because they all seem to be. And then some. They're crazy! There were several fights and drunken stupors to be witnessed. Oh, and one other observation, they enjoy horrendous music. If there's one negative thing to be said about Topless Day, it's that the music that blasts out of every other Jeep is full of nasty lyrics and, well, just sucks to be honest. There was one song in particular that you would recognize if you heard it, and it was particularly popular. We literally heard it like 20 times or more. It became a joke to us. It was the SAME SONG. Over and over different Jeeps would be blasting this freaking song! haha AHHH!!!! I had to turn on some metal every now and then to just clear my head. haha
Anyway, night time. With the night also came all the awesome lighting that people have added to their Jeeps. Crazy headlights, KCs, halos, LED illumination, you name it. It was pretty awesome. Here are some horrible night time cell phone pics.
I hadn't mentioned it yet but there was this little water channel across the "road" that you had to cross to get to "the party" and, further down the beach, our camp site. It started when we showed up to be about, oh, maybe 1.5 feet deep. There was one point when, top down, I decided to gun it through. It had increased in depth to maybe around 2 feet or so and I hit it going, well, too fast. Water shot up and POURED into the car. I mean the seats, us, the back, the carpet, the radio, everything was wet! I thought it was pretty funny, but my wife was, well, pretty upset about it. I'd gotten water all over her and she just didn't see the humor in it. Oh well. Sorry honey. :( I won't do it again.
On Saturday night one of the attractions was to either participate in or just watch people gunning it through the pit or stopping mid-way through to burn out and dig the hole deeper. People were getting stuck, people were losing axles trying to pull each other out, it was nuts. My wife and I just looked at each other and marveled at how "different" this experience was for both of us. haha More bad cell phone pics.
My wife and I finally decided we'd had about enough and made our way back to our tent for a campfire and some smores. Check this sucker out.
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| mmmmmmmmmm |
We went to bed at, oh, midnight or so completely exhausted, gritty from the sand, and rather sunburned as well. Time for a good night's sleep....
BOOM! WHAT WAS THAT?!?
I looked out of our little tent window and noticed that our canopy cover was, uh, gone. I got out and quickly noticed that the tide had come WAY up, all the way to the tent, had saturated the ground, loosened the pegs, and "bye canopy!" We'd just BOUGHT that darn thing! This was at about 3:30 in the morning. I jumped up and out and noticed that the canopy didn't make it too far (thank goodness). I was able to recover it. I broke it down, put it up, and tried to figure out what I was going to do about everything else. We still had out chairs, our tent, coolers, junk here and there, it was a total mess. Here's how far the water came up.
Keep in mind we started the weekend at least, oh, 100 feet or more from the waterline. The ground got saturated enough to loosen our tent pegs as well and I had to get creative to keep our tent from blowing away. Here's what my handiwork looked like after the sun came up.
Gotta love bungies! I bungied the tent to the car in 4 different places. It worked though, we didn't blow away.
Since everything was wet and half-put up anyway we decided to take out pretty early. We got everything packed up and cruised the beach a couple more times to see who was left and it was like night and day. 4000 Jeeps one day, about 50 the next. We were pretty surprised to see how well most people cleaned up after themselves. It was like nothing had happened.
Here we are on the Ferry back to Galveston.
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| sanded |
We finally made it to civilization and ate at our favorite place in Galveston, the Gumbo Diner. We polished off a fun and eventful weekend with a huge bowl of seafood gumbo.
Looking forward to next year! Now to get a lift, bigger tires, halo lights, seat covers, a flag holder, ........
Jeep Wave Count: 54
