Montana Keeps on Rolling, Travels for 2007, January 21, 2007, Drizzle & Birds

We are in our Winter Home, Mission, Texas. But, weather-wise, we are confused, are we still in lower Michigan?? YIKES. The temps in Mission for the first 3 weeks we are here, are not much better than in lower Michigan, only about 10 degrees warmer, and it is wet here.

There is no way to describe the term "Drizzle" until you have experienced it. There is light drizzle, that is rather like living in a cloud, heavy fog, maybe? Then there is drizzle, which is not enough wet coming down to call it rain, but it is still wet, very wet. Add a wind and you have sideways drizzle. How's this for a description: YUCKY!

For the first 6 or more weeks of our stay here in Mission we have, well, CRUMMY weather! Some friends that have been coming here for over 12 years say they have never seen anything this bad. We are in a subtropical climate here, they grow ficus trees IN the ground, just like I might grow a maple at home in Michigan. I have heard that this is the worst cold/wet/nasty winter season here, like ever??

And, nasty it was. We even had several nights where it was almost to the freezing mark. We had one particularly memorable (?) day when the wind chill was 30 according to the local weather, only, when I put the numbers into a wind chill chart I came up with about 5 above. My fingers hurt, even with gloves on.

Anyway, it is not what is expected for weather here in extreme southern Texas. There were some really bad cases of cabin fever, after 6 days in a row of wet, windy, gray, cold days closeted in less than 400 square feet of rolling homes, there were a LOT of cases of cabin fever around the Rio Grande Valley.

Once in a while the sun would pop out for a day, January 21st, for example! And, it was warm enough to ride bikes. Al and I grabbed the camera and headed for the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park on our bikes.






Click here to see a small slide show of photos taken at the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park.  This is an Altamira Oriole.





We of course, have been attending activities here at the park, Saturday mornings, usually finds us in the clubhouse for coffee and donuts. There have been several different entertainers here at the park, one was a local high school group, singing tunes from the WWII era. We of course, visit with our MOC friends, and had one gathering in January and another in February. We have attended one high school performance, at the LaJoya district, they did a performance of Show Tunes. That was a great way to spend a wet gray afternoon, they are so talented and energetic we all left feeling better about the day.