rollingin2007pg02

Montana Keeps on Rolling, Travels for 2007
Part 2

We are in our Winter Home, Mission, Texas. But, weather-wise, we are confused, are we still in lower Michigan?? YIKES. The temps in Mission for the first 3 weeks we are here, are not much better than in lower Michigan, only about 10 degrees warmer, and it is wet here.

There is no way to describe the term "Drizzle" until you have experienced it. There is light drizzle, that is rather like living in a cloud, heavy fog, maybe? Then there is drizzle, which is not enough wet coming down to call it rain, but it is still wet, very wet. Add a wind and you have sideways drizzle. How's this for a description: YUCKY!

For the first 6 or more weeks of our stay here in Mission we have, well, CRUMMY weather! Some friends that have been coming here for over 12 years say they have never seen anything this bad. We are in a subtropical climate here, they grow ficus trees IN the ground, just like I might grow a maple at home in Michigan. I have heard that this is the worst cold/wet/nasty winter season here, like ever??

And, nasty it was. We even had several nights where it was almost to the freezing mark. We had one particularly memorable (?) day when the wind chill was 30 according to the local weather, only, when I put the numbers into a wind chill chart I came up with about 5 above. My fingers hurt, even with gloves on.

Anyway, it is not what is expected for weather here in extreme southern Texas. There were some really bad cases of cabin fever, after 6 days in a row of wet, windy, gray, cold days closeted in less than 400 square feet of rolling homes, there were a LOT of cases of cabin fever around the Rio Grande Valley.

Once in a while the sun would pop out for a day, January 21st, for example! And, it was warm enough to ride bikes. Al and I grabbed the camera and headed for the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park on our bikes.

Click on the photo of the Altamira Oriole to see a small slide show of photos taken at the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park.

We of course, have been attending activities here at the park, Saturday mornings, usually finds us in the clubhouse for coffee and donuts. There have been several different entertainers here at the park, one was a local high school group, singing tunes from the WWII era. We of course, visit with our MOC friends, and had one gathering in January and another in February. We have attended one high school performance, at the LaJoya district, they did a performance of Show Tunes. That was a great way to spend a wet gray afternoon, they are so talented and energetic we all left feeling better about the day. Carol took a trip to Monterrey Mexico:

On January 23rd, Carol took a day trip to Monterrey, Mexico. Sadly, the weather was lousy to say the least, as it was very low visibility. They tell me Monterrey is a city surrounded by hills and mountains, I could verify that there were hills, but I could see little more than the first several rows of homes built up the side. Monterrey also has some terrific monuments and parks. We had lunch at the Radison Hotel, and it was marvelous, great food. After lunch, because of the weather conditions, we could not do some of the activities normally planned for the trip, so instead they took us to the Mexican Museum of History. This is a top notch facility, sadly our time was very limited, they have college aged docents who will take a tour around, they speak very good English, very worth the stop. After the museum, they took us to a Canyon nearby, I did not get the name, but I won't forget it, even with the low cloud cover, Click on the colorful photo on the right, to see a short slide show.

I hope you will enjoy the slide shows I am incorporating into my web pages. The idea is to be able to show you more photos, with much better resolution, without slowing down the load time on the actual web pages and without using up my storage allotment here at Geocities.com. If you are currently on a slow internet connection, please come back another time to view the slide shows.