We're settling into resort life!

In the middle of the winter when the trees are bare of leaves in most of the country, we are now far enough south where they enjoy summer-like weather all year long. We drove the motor home the last 85 miles to arrive at Bentsen Grove Resort. We've spent some time at this resort for the last seven winters because Denisa's Mother winters here. In fact, this is the street where her park model winter home has been for the last 37 winters! She started coming here when she was 55 years old, and she turns 92 this spring. Being here to help her is the reason we come back every winter.

One of our favorite parts of this resort is the citrus trees that are sprinkled throughout the park. In fact, we chose our site because it is surrounded by orange trees. But last winter we experienced a very unusual hard freeze on Valentine's Day 2021. The fruit hanging on the trees froze, and we wondered what the long term effects on the trees would be. We got our answer when we saw that most of the citrus trees were dead or severely damaged a year later.

All the upper branches are dead on this grapefruit tree at Denisa's Mother's house. The only green leaves have sprouted off the trunk. That's not where the leaves are supposed to be.

Denisa's Mother's favorite is the tangerine tree in her back yard. She planted it herself many years ago. We are glad to see that it survived the freeze. While the fruit is smaller and the rind is unusually tight, we are glad to see that we'll have at least a little citrus in our diet this winter.

While many of the flowering plants froze, we are glad to see that some of them have sprung back to life. The owner of this lot reported that they trimmed the limp and frozen stems of this plant down to the ground, and it has come back from the root prettier than ever.

So when we rolled into the lot where we have stayed for part of the last several winters, our view was different. The weeds were also tall and our lot was in severe need of mowing. We have seen "help wanted" signs are all over the country, and the same is true for the Rio Grande Valley. We found that this park is having a hard time finding workers to employ. 

So we spent a couple hours pulling weeds and mowing tall grass and clover before we even pulled the motor home into its camping spot. When we sold our house almost eight years ago, we thought our days of mowing our yard was over.

We also picked up fallen palm branches. We have a very tall palm tree in our site, and it is shedding some of its dry branches. They seem bigger down on the ground than they look way up on that tall palm tree. Each fallen branch is about ten feet long.

We took longer than usual getting the motor home situated into its spot. We put pads down under the wheels and leveled things especially well. We'll be here for a couple months, enjoying the warm temperatures and activities that you get from resort life. We are as far south as one can be in this big state of Texas. In fact, the border with Mexico is just four miles south of our campground. While our current national administration quit work on the border wall, we see that the state of Texas is now working on it. The construction vehicles are at work just a few miles from us.

While we have seen the news stories of the flood of illegal immigrants, we haven't seen it close to our campground. We do see the border patrol vehicles and some national guard presence, and we feel very safe here. It's not as exciting as moving around and wandering God's wonders, but it's a nice way to spend the colder months of the year. So we're settling into resort life for a while.