It Looks Like Spring!

One of Denisa's favorite parts of visiting South Texas during past spring breaks was the sweet smell of citrus blooms.  It's one of her favorite aromas.  So Denisa is so excited that we stayed long enough to smell the citrus blooms this year!  We wish we had a smell-a-blog option, because we would love to share it!  Citrus fruit is amazing to us, because a ripe piece of fruit can hang on the tree and will still be a fresh tree-ripened piece of fruit months later when it is picked.  A tree will also start blooming for the next crop when the mature fruit is still hanging on the tree.

But our month-long stay is over in Mission, so it is time to pack up and head down the road to our next location.

"Packing" included picking fruit to take along with us. The orange tree on our lot and Denisa's mother's tangerine tree were just covered with fruit.  Mark used a ladder and stretched to the tallest branches to pick, but there were still bushels left on the lower branches.  We squeezed oranges from the tree beside our motorhome, and froze quart bags full of "liquid sunshine" to take with us.  We love having a full-size residential freezer that allows us plenty of freezer room!  When slightly defrosted, this makes a slushy orange icee that you can eat with a spoon.  Completely defrosted it is fresh squeezed orange juice that will make it hard for us to go back to drinking the kind you buy in the grocery store.  We even had one bag of grapefruit juice.

The back of our car has become our citrus storage unit, as we have way too much to fit in the refrigerator.  We are excited that we could bring a taste of the Rio Grande Valley north with us, and we can continue enjoying plentiful citrus for a good while later.

The day we left, Denisa's Mother fixed us a going-away breakfast, and we were on the road around 9:00. After being city dwellers for so long, it was nice to be on the open road, and we were surprised to see all the wildflowers blooming in the highway medians.

While we were driving north to our next destination, we texted with Denisa's sister who was heading south from Oklahoma City.  While we were enjoying wildflowers, they were driving 10 miles per hour on I-35 in snow and ice.  So we're thinking that it isn't spring everywhere!