A page from Brother Bill’s trip book. Warm sweet oranges right off the tree outside our door.
A few more interesting birds:
Great kiskadee. One.
Lesser goldfinches. Flocks.
Golden fronted woodpecker in the campground.
Anhinga. Like a cormorant, but snakelike neck and head. They can swim with their entire body underwater so just that snakelike head and neck shows. Loch Ness cormorants. We’ve seen them in Florida, but never in Texas.
More pied billed grebes. Flocks. They don’t flock, but flocks.
More least grebes. Same as above.
Common ground doves. Tiny cute little things. About the size of the smallest shorebirds.
Inca doves. Almost as tiny as the ground doves.
Vermillion flycatcher.
A sandhill crane flyby.
And, David Menough, are you listening? Tropical Kingbird. A Tropical Kingbird. Number 334 on our life list.
And… and, we got the kingfisher trifecta. The grand slam of kingfishers. All three, ringed, belted, and green, all in one day. All at the same place, in fact. How cool is that?
I have to explain that David Menough is a bird person. In fact, he is such a bird person he has a weekly radio show called “bird talk”. So here we are in South Texas, sending bird reports back to see if we’ve seen anything he hasn’t seen. He hasn’t let us know if we’ve struck a nerve yet.
The sore knee really liked the sand. Our beach was flat, of course, but not steep either, so there wasn’t any lateral torque on the joints. Even better, I could run barefoot. Nice hard packed level sand. Without the rotating weight of shoes, running feels supercharged. Each shoe doesn’t weigh much, but multiply a few ounces by a few thousand repetitions, and that’s a lot of weight saved.
Speaking of weight, one of the things that didn’t come along when we moved into the motorhome was the bathroom scale. We’ll have to guess at how our weight is doing. We’ll have to monitor our weight by paying attention to whether we have to keep buying longer belts or not. So far, the belts still fit.
