We've had some visitors!

Note: We're including some blogs from the month of March that were interrupted when we had to make a speedy trip to Oklahoma to help after Denisa's Mother's house burned. So we are catching up with "old blogs" while we are still helping out in Oklahoma.

While we are visiting in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, we also hosted some visitors. For one week, Denisa's sister and brother-in-law rented one of the apartments in the resort so they could be "winter Texans" too. The picture below is of these two sisters smiling, but what are they doing?

Denisa bought a coconut at the local farmer's market, and we were cutting it up. We haven't done that in many years. We're glad that we don't have to live off the coconut water and meat, because we really didn't think either was very tasty.

They were here during an unusually cool week with an unusually large number of misty weather days. So we spent more time indoors than we would have liked. We kept the indoor shuffleboard table in use, because the outdoor ones were wet.

When all four of us weren't playing, then Mark and our brother-in-law Joe would sneak over to the rec hall to play. They had to take a picture of the scoreboard when Joe beat Mark 17-1. It was the only picture that Joe let us take all week!

We also played lots of cards, and did our fair share of eating. On one of the warmer days, we did some walking and visited the neighboring bird feeders.

We also took them for a tram ride in the state park. If we had a little more time, we might even recruit Connie to enjoy the birds like we do.

Denisa takes the pictures, so we have to put them in the blog. We can now identify most of the birds we see in the park. The picture above is a green jay, and the picture below is of a kiskadee,

We saw lots of cardinals,

and the beautiful orioles.

We learned a new bird today when we spotted this American Kestrel. This is the smallest falcon in North America, and he was posing for a picture on the power line as we left the park.

While we might some day recruit Connie to bird-watch, Joe was more interested in the army vehicles that are always parked at the state park these days. The governor of the state of Texas has dispatched the national guard to this area that is only a mile from the Mexico border.

Our next set of visitors included Denisa's cousin and his wife. They were only here for a couple days, but we certainly had better weather for their stay. They knew that their Aunt Betty had been coming to South Texas for many years, but they had never experienced it for themselves. One day we showed them how close we were to the Rio Grande River.

They wanted to see things unique to the area, so we also took them for a drive through the cabbage and onion fields. Equally unique, we took them to a "Ropa Usada." That is spanish for "used clothing." They bring in bales of all kinds of clothing, and visitors can hunt through the mountains of clothing. Anything is sold for ten cents per pound, and we saw people leaving with sacks of treasures. It's a true cultural experience to visit here.

After two days, they left us to continue their trip to Padre Island. We got a report that the traffic was terrible on the island during this busy spring break season. While we had two sets of visitors, it sounds like Padre Island had lots of visitors. After Covid shut down visitors in 2020, and certainly limited group activities in 2021, we're glad to see that we can once again host visitors in 2022!