The One Thing More Beautiful than Spring Wildflowers . . .

We put the slides in on the motor home, and turned off the water to get it ready to be left alone for a while. We are leaving it in its camping space in South Texas, since we are driving Denisa's Mother home to Oklahoma in her car. Things stay green all year in the Rio Grande Valley, but there were signs of spring as we started our long journey north. It was fun to see some yellow wildflowers in the highway median among the palm trees.

Denisa couldn't help herself from taking pictures of the beautiful wildflowers as they blurred by us in the median.

We saw good samplings of many color combinations, but we never stopped long enough to get good pictures.

That's because we had a deadline to make. We had lunch plans in our favorite German restaurant in Fredericksburg, Texas. The Old German Bakery Restaurant closes in the early afternoon, and we wanted to eat their specialties. The three of us shared the Rouladen and House Schnitzel, red cabbage, sauerkraut, and German potato salad. Add an apricot fritter for dessert, and we had a German feast!

Some of the most famous bluebonnet wildflower drives in Texas are around Fredericksburg. So we called the visitor center to get the latest information on where the wildflowers were blooming. The woman that answered the phone said that the bluebonnets weren't blooming anywhere in this county, and we should come back in two weeks. Disappointed, we opted for a drive out to Wildseed Farms, in hopes they would have something interesting in bloom.

Even though they did have a trail with pretty signage and interesting things for sale, the wildflowers were definitely not in bloom yet. This is the largest working wildflower farm in the nation, and they have been in business for 35 years. So it looks like the visitor center was right.

Along one fence line, we found a few of the coveted bluebonnets beginning to bloom.

We were a little sad to miss the bluebonnets as we drove north out of town. But that's when we began to see that signature blue color along the road.

They got thicker and brighter, until we just had to pull over and stop to get some pictures that weren't blurred by the motion of the car.

This might not be peak blooms, but we couldn't see how it could get much better. Perhaps the people at the visitor center should get out of town more often?

We had to take the quintessential picture sitting in the middle of a field of bluebonnets. Mark obviously thought it was more important to focus on the floral subject instead of the human subject.

We drove with bluebonnets all along the road for many miles. Some times they were mixed with other colorful wildflowers, and we kept repeating, "They are still going . . . They are still going."

Our wildflower blooms finally stopped, and we noticed that the grass was no longer green and the trees were bare of leaves. It was like we were traveling in a time machine backwards from spring into winter as we drove north. We spent the night in Stephenville, Texas, to break up the long drive. After 15 hours on the road, we finally drove into the Oklahoma City area the next afternoon, and our first stop was to see our granddaughter, who was visiting at her other grandparents' house.

We love many things about full-time RVing with the great opportunities to see all the parts of this grand country. But the one thing we don't like is being far away from our family for long periods of time.

Our eight-month-old grandbaby has turned into a ten-month-old crawler since we saw her last. That's a big percentage of her life, and she has definitely changed since the last time we were with her! We've seen some beautiful wildflowers on this trip, but she's the most beautiful thing to us!