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.