How do we decide where to spend the winter months?

As full-time RVers, we have many options for places to spend the winter months. We've found that those different places have positives and negatives. Some people head to the deserts of Arizona, where cactus and sand are the main view out the RV window. Some flock to Florida, where the areas with the views of the ocean or the gulf are the most crowded and most expensive. We also hear that the traffic there is crazy. Others go further south for an international experience in Mexico, but that conjures up safety concerns in recent years. Here in south Texas we can get a little of all three. Cactus grows well here in our RV park--maybe too well. Overhead gutters must be checked regularly.  . .

or you can have a good-sized prickly pear cactus growing in your gutter over the summer.

This beautiful cactus is over six-feet tall and doing well in the desert-like conditions of the Rio Grande Valley. The spider spinning an intricate web among the cactus arms is doing even better. He's a little blurry, but looking very content in the center of the picture below.

To get water views, it takes around 1.5 hours to be on South Padre Island. We can also get the international experience in a day-trip by crossing the border into Mexico with a drive of less than an hour.

This past weekend we got another international experience when we took Denisa's Mother to the International Food Festival. It's held every year at St. George Orthodox Church, not too far away in Pharr, Texas.

We ate the food before we remembered to take a picture of our plates. The three of us shared the pastitsio, and spanakopita from Greece, holubtsi and vareniki from the Ukraine, and bierocks from Germany. If you are impressed with Denisa's correct spelling of all these words she can't even pronounce, just know that she took pictures of the signs on the wall that described each of the foods available for sale.

For dessert we finished up with Greek baklava and galaktoboureko. It was a tasty touch of food from around the world. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, so we also enjoyed the rest of the outdoor exhibits--especially those manned by the master gardeners' booth. We never cease to be amazed with God's wonder of the monarch butterfly. That ugly caterpillar wraps up in a green marble-looking chrysalis with its dainty gold detailing.

After approximately 2 weeks, that caterpillar becomes a beautiful monarch butterfly. The wings on this one are still wrinkled and wet from just emerging out of that cramped chrysalis. That's another of God's wonders!

We must say that the traffic to get to the festival was terrible. It was a Saturday close to Christmas, and everyone was driving some place! We would often have to wait through more than one cycle to get through stop lights, and road construction on the expressway some times brought that fastest artery to a stand-still. Denisa's Mother has been coming to the Rio Grande Valley for over 30 years, and she remembers when Mission, McAllen, Pharr, Donna and Weslaco were little towns. Now they have grown together into one large metropolitan area linked by an expressway that needs more lanes to handle all the traffic. The good news is that we have all the big box stores and national restaurant chains nearby. The bad news is that the traffic often makes that short trip seem like a long one. 

To make that trip seem even longer, we broke the record high temperature for this date by 8 degrees! The record high was 85 degrees, and we came in at a stifling 93 that Saturday. Considering that the average for December's high temperatures is in the very pleasant low 70's, we are way above average right now. To all our friends freezing up north, we apologize for complaining about the heat.

We started this blog with the question of how we decide where to spend the winter months. It's not just about cactus, oceans, or international experiences. The main reason we are here is to spend time with Denisa's Mother. South Texas is where she has wintered for over 30 years. In the five years that we have spent time here at Bentsen Grove Resort, we have also met more people that we look forward to seeing every winter. So to answer the question, "How do we decide where to spend the winter months?" we answer that it is a personal choice. Personally, we decided based on the persons we love.