Don't take for granted the ability to walk and stand up straight

We have been blessed with health and strong bodies that enjoy walking wherever we want to go. It's so nice to take the parking place at the far end of the parking lot, knowing that we enjoy walking those extra steps. It's nice to take the stairs instead of the elevator just because we like the exercise. Ever once in a while we need to remember not to take for granted the ability to walk easily and to be able to stand up straight!

We are glad to report that with warm temperatures here in the Rio Grande Valley, we are beginning to see tiny green leaves on the citrus trees. They have turned from a sad brown color, to a happy fresh green. It looks like the two nights of 21 degrees will definitely shock the trees, but doesn't kill them.

The RV park should be filled with the heavenly scent of citrus blooms by now, but we aren't getting that this year. On close inspection, however, we found little white balls on the trees in the picture above. Those will be opening soon into those glorious-smelling blooms. We did find a few opened blossoms, and got a whiff of the sweet natural perfume. It will be interesting to see if we have any fruit next year, or if the blooms (and therefore the fruit) will just be delayed.

We are well into our second month stay here at Bentsen Grove Resort. It's nice to see that the trees canopying this resort street are back to the beautiful green we are accustomed to.

The Texas Governor has removed the state-wide mandatory mask rule, but the park is still very stern about wearing masks inside all their buildings. Most of the winter residents have now gotten their second vaccinations, and we are seeing more social gatherings outside. It's fun to recognize people from past years now that we can see their faces. We are also seeing the arrival of some residents that waited up north until they got their shots. So this second month at the resort has seemed friendlier.

The activity director at Bentsen Grove is working hard to plan activities that are outdoors and socially-distanced. We participated in the first-ever glow-stick scavenger hunt. It was an after-dark activity, and we were one of the few teams riding our bicycles in the dark, as most people have golf carts. But our speedy bikes were good for a third-place finish, as we collected 13 glow sticks that night.

We've also done another poker run. Here the local leprechauns were handing out our playing cards, as well as yummy snacks at each of the seven stops within the park. Denisa's poker hand of three aces fell just short of the money this time.

We also enjoyed the St. Patrick's Day parade with twenty decorated golf carts. Some of the carts threw candy and beads to the spectators, and some spectators served appropriately green snacks and drinks to the carts. It was the most reciprocal parade we had ever experienced.

The honorary parade marshal was our friend Patrick, who was born on St. Patrick's Day 80 years ago today. He certainly doesn't act his age!

After that resort-life update, we should get back to the title of the blog and our first paragraph. Mark is a month away from a significant birthday, and his body must have decided to start acting older in celebration of turning 60. He was having so much foot pain that he was no longer parking on the far end of the parking lot or taking the stairs. After nursing a limp on a sore foot for months, he finally made an appointment to see a podiatrist. The doctor thought his problem was a case of falling arches and a too-flexible foot. We're hoping that the prescribed shoe insoles will give him relief so we can be back on the hiking trails this summer! We know that we shouldn't take for granted the ability to walk without pain. Denisa snapped this picture at the podiatrist office of the lovely shoes available if these insoles aren't enough.

 But we really don't know if his feet are better yet, because he's been off them for a week. He doesn't know what started it, but he suddenly started having muscle spasms in his lower back. It's the kind of pain that will literally drive you to your knees, and it was impossible to stand up straight. We didn't take any pictures. But just imagine Mark hunched over, looking and moving like someone about twenty years older. Wait! Patrick is twenty years older and he is still moving great!

While Mark was in such back pain, we were glad that we were still hanging out at the resort, rather than some scenic new spot where we couldn't enjoy the new scenery. Mark has tried everything that anyone recommended. That would include wearing a back brace,

ice packs, pain-relieving patches, rubbing ointments, stretches, and every back pain pill we could find. It was a long week! Finally, after six days the spasms retreated and he is once again the tall guy that doesn't take for granted the ability to stand up straight. It reminds us that being able to walk and move painlessly is a great blessing, and a necessity for the way we wander God's wonders. We shouldn't take our blessings for granted!

Our plans are cast in Jello

Our original plan for this winter was to spend one month at Bentsen Grove Resort in the Rio Grande Valley, then fly for our grandbaby-sitting gig in Kansas City. Upon our return, we were planning to start up the motor home and head west. Instead of making our plans in stone, our plans are often cast in Jello. In fact, Covid has brought us an entire year of Jello plans. So instead of hitting the road, we have signed up for another month of resort life. That allowed us to take Denisa's Mother for her second Covid shot. Now we feel better about her protection from Covid, even though we are too young to get shots for ourselves here in Texas.

This extra month will also mean that we will be around long enough to drive her and her car back home in Oklahoma. We plan to stay there for a week so we can visit our Oklahoma relatives. When we fly back to south Texas from Oklahoma City, we will then make more Jello-like plans to continue west in the motor home. So for now, we are enjoying another month of pickleball and dancing while wearing masks.

After being away for eight days, we came back to see the longer term-effects of February's deep freezing temperatures. The always-green orange tree beside our motor home is always-brown for the first time.

A bike ride down the green shaded path towards the state park is now a collection of dead tropical plants.

We're accustomed to cactus that grow year-round for so many years that they become cactus trees. But this old cactus has met its match with the winter of 2021.

We've never seen this valley look so brown, and it was certainly a sad storm for the vegetation. But the bird and bug populations have also taken a serious hit. Butterflies and birds migrate here, and suddenly their food sources are gone. We have never seen so many red-winged black birds in our front yard, foraging for any bits of food.

People are leaving out bowls of sugar water for the bees, and are having to refill them several times each day. All the pollen-producing plants froze with those 21-degree temperatures. Around here, you can plant any house-plant in the ground, and it grows to gigantic proportions. People plant their Christmas poinsettias in the yard, and in a couple years they have a poinsettia tree. Those cute little spruce Christmas trees that grow in four-inch pots become huge trees with year-round sunshine. But it looks like all those house-plant-trees died with the freeze. We have lost some beautiful examples of horticulture in our park!

So for now, we are enjoying another month of sunshine and warm weather. We've done some bike riding on the nice trails around Mission, Texas.

This trail takes us along one of the irrigation canals, and it's often a good place to spot water fowl.

When Mark is biking by himself, he'll often go off-roading on the narrow trails that wind through the cactus and mesquite. With Denisa's reputation for bike wrecks, it's probably best that she doesn't bike on trails when crashing would result in so many cactus punctures to her tires and body.

Since we are only a few miles from the Mexico border, our rides often take us right to the border wall.

We're not sure why there are sections of the wall that are missing, or why it abruptly stops in places. Our local news is filled with images of people pouring over the border in these spots, and rafting or swimming over the Rio Grande River. The Border Patrol pickups are a constant reminder that the area is being patrolled, but this area is dealing with the chaos of open borders.

The average temperature for this time of year is in the upper 70's, and we've had many days over 80 degrees. So even though our plans are made in Jello, our Jello is beginning to melt in this heat. We are ready to make plans to head west and north soon.

A Lucky Day of Flying!

We certainly prefer our form of travel in a motor home, where we never have to pack a suitcase to visit scenic places. But occasionally we need to fly someplace. Our trip to Kansas City to babysit was our first flight since the pandemic began. We can report that the airports are busy, and the flights are full. Masks are required in all airports and on all airplanes. So there's no break from that mask from the time you arrive an hour before your departure until you leave your final airport. That's a long eight hours for us today! It gave us an opportunity to appreciate all those people that have to wear masks every day all day for their jobs. While planes are supposed to be sanitized between flights, each passenger is handed a pre-packaged sanitized wipe to scrub down their space. Only sealed beverages were available on our flights, and we didn't even get those little bags of peanuts.

We got a text message that our second flight today was over-booked, so we weren't surprised when they asked for three volunteers to give up their seats. Because our schedule is flexible, we were first to the counter to accept the $500 flight vouchers in exchange for our seats. They booked us for the next flight and we were very happy for that deal. What a lucky day of flying!

The gate clerk couldn't get the third volunteer, so they upped the ante. No one volunteered for $700, and the clerk assured us that our vouchers would go up to the same amount it took to get that third seat. So we were delighted when the last seat wasn't cleared until the offer went up to $1,000! 

We had to wait to be sure that everyone showed up to fill all the seats, and then they completed the paper-work for our free United Airlines credit. What a lucky flight day! We sat in the airport for an extra hour and a half until the next United flight to McAllen, and now we have $2,000 in free flights over the next couple years! As an added bonus, we also got seated in an emergency exit row with all that extra leg room!

So we still prefer traveling in our motor home and not having to pack suitcases. But over the next year, we will be flying the friendly skies of United for at least $2,000 worth of flights. What a lucky day of flying!

A Week of being Gram and Grand-dude

When we first dreamed about names that our grandchildren would call us, we came up with very traditional "Gram" and "Grandad." But several months ago, our two-year-old granddaughter called Mark Grand-dude. When everyone laughed at her new name, she kept repeating it. So it looks like Mark has officially been renamed. 

We recently flew to Kansas City to do some baby-sitting while our son and daughter-in-law went snow skiing. Because of the winter weather delaying our arrival by four days, we also changed our departure so we could stay for eight days. We're soaking in good grandbaby time for a week of grandparenting!

Eli is now four months old, and he doesn't even look like the same baby we saw the last time we were here two months ago! Denisa thinks he's as pretty as the Gerber baby. Grand-dude pointed out that he is handsome--not pretty.

Carter is two-and-a-half years old, and she really doesn't like us taking pictures of her. When we point the camera her way, we usually get, "No photos please!" from her. At least she's polite about her dislike for taking pictures. But we occasionally get a sneaky picture when she's busy with a cooking project with Gram.

She's especially good with the clean up duties when we are finished making something like a cheesecake.

Arriving late because of all the weather delays, we only had the two of them by ourselves for one day. That one day made us appreciate how tiring it is to be responsible for two little ones. It's been a long time since we had two children this age. Eli might look innocent enough, but he needs continuous bottle-feedings and diaper changes (and he is an expert at soaking us when we are trying to get a new diaper in place). All this can wear out a couple of old wanderers. Hats off to their parents for keeping up with this schedule all the time!

The rest of the week we helped with child care, and concentrated on getting lots of snuggles and having fun. We had a couple days of nice weather, so we enjoyed the park. Now with two grandchildren we each have one to swing. Double the fun!

Even though it's a warm day here, they still have remnants of last week's snow storm.

They've had a cold winter in the Kansas City area, as evidenced by their back yard pond that is still frozen. While it was thawing, we could see something's foot prints that walked all the way across on the ice.

On the warmest day of our stay, we took Eli for his first trip to the zoo. He looks a little worried about his big sister's ability to drive the animal safari jeep in the welcome center. The orangutan in the front seat seems happy, but all the back seat passengers look worried.

We visited the real orangutans, and took a group photo by the statue out front.

We haven't been to the zoo in a while, and Kansas City has a good one! We spent a nice afternoon with the elephants,

and the reptiles (and their corresponding statues).

Kansas City has a very nice indoor penguin exhibit, and it was lunch time at the penguin display.

Carter got to see the larger emperor penguins up close as they swam up to the glass. Her reaction to this close-up view was, "He almost poked me!"

When entering the Australia exhibit, we had to walk through an additional gate. That's because the kangaroos are not fenced in. It was fun seeing them hop down the same trail where we were walking.

We've been taking lots of pictures of birds on our hikes in south Texas, so it was fun to get a few bird photos at the zoo.

It's even more fun to get pictures of our granddaughter talking to the colorful lorikeets.

Their zoo pass includes free rides on the carousel, but Carter is still working up her courage to ride on those wild animals that go round and round.

We walked all the way to Africa, only to find that Gram's favorite animals--the giraffes--don't come out until it is 70 degrees by noon. That's not going to happen any time soon in Kansas City, so we made the very long walk back towards the entrance. We got in over four miles today--most of it while Grand-dude was carrying one of our grandchildren. To honor his tired arms, we include a picture taken in the shadow of Grand-dude's favorite animal--the polar bear.

The week of grandparenting flew by, and we're always sad when it's time to leave our children and grandchildren. It was a week of good quality time with this precious family. 

While we love hiking in scenic areas, we also are blessed to get to spend time with some special family members during our life on the road. Our granddaughter got a new motor home toy while we were visiting. She's practicing with it for the time when she'll get to travel with Gram and Grand-dude in our motor home!

Four days of delays

Our blogs have been delayed, as we have been distracted lately. The cold spell that this blog describes is now gone, but the memory and frustrations it brought are still part of our traveling story . . .

While we were watching the temperatures plummet here in the Rio Grande Valley, we were also anxiously watching the weather in Houston. Months ago we purchased airplane tickets so we could make a very important trip back to the cold north. Our oldest son and his wife had scheduled a winter ski trip, and we were the designated baby-sitters while they were away. While their weather was cold and they had some new snow, their flights out of Kansas City to the Colorado ski mountains were all on schedule for the ski trip. But we were very sad to see that our flights from South Texas through Houston and on to Kansas City were cancelled!

We would spend the next two days looking through flight options and on the telephone to United Airlines to try to find a way to get to Kansas City on time. We booked a new flight--only to see it got cancelled. We booked a third flight--only to see that it was cancelled. We looked into driving to Houston and booked a fourth flight out of Houston--only to see it got cancelled. We tried routes flying through Denver or Charlotte, but we found that the only way out of the tip of Texas is through Houston or Dallas--and both those airports were closed!

We made preparations to make the 16-hour drive to Kansas City, but we found the highways iced over and closed between here and there. In fact, the Texas Department of Transportation web site showed that the roads were impossible!

We were glad that the other set of grandparents had a vehicle that would make it through the snowy roads at their home near Oklahoma City. Once out of that snow, the roads were clear for their five-hour drive to Kansas City so the ski trip wasn't ruined. We couldn't get our flight through Houston for another couple days because now everything was overbooked. What a travel mess! This is the first time we have flown since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. It is certainly a pain to wear a mask the entire time we were in the airport and the airplane--that's over 7 hours of masking up. As we flew into Houston, we were looking for the snow that caused all our delays. We didn't see any snow left on the ground below us.

What we could see was the brown smog that settled in over the entire city. The downtown skyscrapers were barely visible through the smog.

In the first picture, we could see an airplane flying beside us. As we lowered in altitude, so did that airplane.

It looks like they are landing at the same time, hopefully on a different runway at the very busy Houston International Airport! 

After two very uneventful flights--just the way we like them--we landed in Kansas City around 10 p.m. Our originally booked flight was supposed to get us here on Tuesday, and we finally arrived on Saturday night. Who would have ever thought that we would have such a hard time flying out of our tropical home this winter, as we arrived to our destination four days late!

Surviving Texas's Record Breaking Cold

 After some of the most pleasant winter weather ever here in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, we saw that the forecast was calling for the entire Midwest to turn into a deep freeze. These Arctic blasts seldom make it all the way to the tip of Texas. But for some reason this cold front had the southern half of Texas in its bullseye. Where we are wintering is actually in a sub-tropical zone, and freezing temperatures are unheard of. So when we saw forecasted lows in the 20s, everyone took notice. 

Our first plan of action was to pick the citrus fruit before it froze on the tree. The day before the big freeze wasn't very pretty. It was misting and in the 40s when we braved the elements and Mark mounted the ladder to get those best fruits at the top of the tree. We first picked the tangerines at Denisa's Mother's house, then we switched to oranges and finally grapefruit. It would be interesting to know how many pounds of fruit we picked today!

That might be the first time we ever wore ear muffs and gloves while spending time in the southern tip of Texas, and it was just going to get colder! Because all the fruit was wet from the rain, it had to be laid out to dry before we stored it. This is not even half of our harvest today.

Mark disconnected the water from the motor home and we turned on our propane heat as we prepared for the first cold night. The next morning we saw the first icicles we have ever seen in our time spent in South Texas during the last seven winters. As you can imagine, it was a very slick first step out of the motor home!

Because of the moisture in the air, the north side of our motor home AND the highways were also covered in ice. We didn't want to get out on the roads this morning, as south Texas drivers have absolutely no experience in driving on the ice. Mark needed to run an errand, and decided to get gas for our pickup this morning. That's when he found out that the first gas station he checked was closed because it had no electricity. At the second station the credit card reader was iced over. This is certainly unusual weather for Mission, Texas!

It was record breaking cold, as the low temperature plummeted to 21 degrees that first night. This cold snap crushed the 74-year-old low temperature record that was 35 degrees. We were 14 degrees colder than the coldest temperature this area had seen this day in three-quarters of a century! That's cold enough to form icicles on our aluminum wheels.

The news reported that most of the state of Texas also broke low temperature records. In fact, this was the first time in Texas history that every county in the state was under a winter storm advisory. We also found out that millions were without electricity in this state. We were lucky to never lose power, but about half of our RV resort neighbors did. We saw park residents invite friends over to warm up, or to sleep over. In this time of Covid isolation, suddenly social distancing had to be interrupted to keep people warm.

We were doubly blessed in that Denisa's Mother's house also never lost power. With high temperatures in the 30s, the park looked like a ghost town as everyone huddled inside for warmth. The electricity was off in all the park's buildings, so there was no place to group together. We were glad that we picked fruit yesterday, as the tropical plants outside took a major hit from the extreme cold.

One of Denisa's favorite tropical plants is the Crown of Thorns, with its brilliant red flowers that stand tall and bright atop this succulent's branches. She walked by this plant every day and always enjoyed it. It's been growing outside year-round for years. But now its bloom heads are bowed and its thorny branches are folding. We're afraid that 21 degrees will kill all the tropical plants, and some of the palm and citrus trees too.

This Arctic blast had a second wave, as we endured a second night with record lows in the 20s. It was interesting to watch the local news, with broadcasters warning of the dangers of such low temperatures. Many of the winter residents here have spent their entire lives in the cold of states like Minnesota or Wisconsin. They scoff at this "cold" when their home states are experiencing temperatures like 40 degrees below zero right now. But those states are much better prepared at handling those cold temperatures, with insulation and generators and the appropriate road maintenance equipment. We also found out that the wind generators up north are outfitted with the equipment to keep those giant fan blades turning even in the coldest weather. The Texas wind generators (that provide 23% of the energy here) froze up because they aren't equipped to withstand these temperatures.

As our food supplies dwindled, we checked to see if neighbors needed anything. We had short lists from four different households when we made a trip for groceries. We had a hard time filling the orders even with stopping at multiple grocery stores. Many stores are closed because they don't have electricity. The ones that are open have been over-shopped by nervous residents. The bread aisle was completely empty . . .

as was the milk display. We also couldn't find a single egg for sale in our multiple stops.

By the next day, every bit of produce and meat were also gone from the local stores. With highways closed north of here, it will take another day or two to get supply trucks down south to fill these shelves. We also found lines that stretched for blocks at open gas stations and propane shops, as everyone got nervous about running out of fuel.

Since half of our park residents are without electricity, we got new neighbors as RVs rolled into any open sites that had power. That is definitely one advantage to having a home on wheels in challenging times like this. We had plenty of food in our pantry, and we could survive on the fruit we picked for a good long while. Being blessed with electricity, it was easy to survive Texas's record breaking cold. For our friends and neighbors without electricity, it was a much more challenging week that South Texans hopes we don't repeat ever again.