Rainy Days Make Good Rest Days

Even when on perpetual vacation, there are days with bad weather. For a city that boasts over 300 days of sunshine per year, we have seen quite a few clouds here.  Albuquerque has received 5 times the normal rainfall for the month of May, and we're only half way through the month.

We took a morning walk after a rainy night (before the rains started again later that day) at Coronado Campground in Bernalillo.  We are 15 miles north of Albuquerque, right along the Rio Grande River.  From our site you can see those majestic Sandia Mountains that we hiked the day before.

It's interesting that the Rio Grande is flowing so well here and in Big Bend National Park.  But in between these two places, when we were in El Paso, it is completely dry.  We had planned to put our kayak in the river while we were staying here.  There is a take-out spot that the commercial outfitters use right here in our campground.  But the weather hasn't cooperated this time.  We'll just have to come back!

We like our site here, and it comes complete with a covered patio and picnic table.  We though it was interesting that the campground was owned by the University of New Mexico and operated by the city of Bernalillo.

While we are drying out from the rain and recovering from yesterday's hike, we saw that the birds were doing the same.  This young roadrunner had his feathers puffed out, and he was drying out on the bench by the river. 

 Again, Mark would say that this bird is not a true "roadrunner", but a "bench-sitter" instead.  He was certainly content to let us take pictures this morning.

We headed upstream on our walk towards the Coronado State Historical Site, where we found a Gambel's Quail singing to the clouds this morning.  He was easy to spot--we just followed his song.  Denisa loves the fact that these birds can always be spotted wearing their fancy hats.  Instead of their more scientific name, we prefer to call them the party-hat birds.

As we walked along the Rio Grande River, we were entertained by a group of violet-green Swallows.  We had to look it up, but the term for a group of swallows is a flight.  This flight of swallows was dipping and diving close to the muddy water of the rain-swollen river.  Since we were on a bluff above the water, we could view them from above to see the pretty colors of their back feathers.  

These birds were tough to photograph because they were zipping by so fast, but Mark accidentally got several birds in one frame.

Besides bird watching, we have also discovered a new activity for rainy days that takes us indoors.  Every Indian tribe runs a casino, so there is fierce competition to get loyal customers.  Some of them offer a great $2 hamburger with all the trimmings that makes an easy rainy-day meal.  Add the New Mexico chile sauce that this state is famous for, and you have a great taste of the local cuisine.  Other casinos offer free-play money to any customers there for the first time.  We have found that we can usually turn that $20 to $50 in free play money into about 80% cash.  For some reason, Mark's percentages are much better than Denisa's even though we use the same game and tactics.  He is obviously the lucky one in this family.  So we get free rainy day entertainment that can pay for a lot of $2 hamburgers.  One of our luckiest casinos was located north of Bernalillo, and is named after the natural rock formation nearby--Camel Rock.

So every day is not an exciting adventure.  Some days we are in recovery mode from long hikes and content to stay close to home.  But tomorrow we have great plans!