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Day three

 We surpassed 100 bird species for the year.  At this pace we’ll have our 400 birds for the year by January 15th!  J We’ve had a chance to try out the new scope; and the digiscoping attachment that lets us take pictures with the smart phone through the scope lens.  The pictures come out like this.   The long-lens of the camera is about 10 power.  The scope starts at 20 power and zooms to 60 power! 
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2016

 We finished up the year getting the motorhome back together for 2017 travels.  Here are a few photos of the interior. The front room floor used to be carpet.  We changed it to vinyl. New couch and reupholstered captain’s chairs.  The kitchen.  No changes. Through the bathroom to the bedroom.  (It’s hard to get far enough from anything to get camera perspective in the bathroom.)    I did a walk-through with the video camera as well:https://youtu.be/544bElNlDyk We are so glad we didn’t sell the motorhome last year.  We dedicated a fraction of the cost of trading-down, to refurbishing it, and the results are wonderful. 
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Happy New year!

 The New Year celebration is a big deal here in the Valley.  A LOT of fireworks.  A fair amount of gunfire as well.  I guess when you run out of fireworks what else can you do but empty the pistol in the air!  We enjoyed the fireworks all around us, but we’ll stay inside now, just in case any of those bullets come back down. Happy New Year Everyone!  
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Happy New Year’s Eve Eve

 It has been a good year for us. We traveled to Colorado in May and had that wonderful 50th anniversary party, thanks to the kids.  As many of you know, we enjoyed that anniversary attention so much that we declared this to be an entire anniversary-year, answering “We’re Golden” to every inquiry about how we’re doing. We dropped down to Arizona in June, at the same time Matt, Lindsay and the kids were there, so we got to visit with them some more.  It was too hot in Arizona in June.  We motored west to the coast and visited with some of Judy’s family in California, then went back to Arizona to do some birding on the way home.  Now it was too hotter in Arizona, approaching 120 degrees!  By the middle of July we were back home to the Valley where it was only 100 degrees.  Hot weather in the house is more comfortable than hot weather in the motorhome though.  We enjoyed the long hot summer. Overall health is good.  I got my neck fixed.  Judy had a couple parts surgically repaired.  I set a new personal best for kidney stones; three passed in a single year! When we go fly fishing in Montana, we always spend a day with Rick out on the drift boat, floating the Madison.  (He’s still young enough to spend all day rowing back and forth across the river as we drift downstream, so we’ll be in exactly the right spot to cast over fish.)  We get a card from him every year whether we fished with him that year or not.  Funny thing, our “younger” fishing guide turned 65 this year.  Nice brown from out of the Madison inside the park (Yellowstone).  We don’t get to fish the Madison inside the park when we’re there.  During warm weather, the water in the Madison River is too hot from the water emptying into it from the Firehole, which runs through the geyser basins.  Need some really cold air to cool that water down while it’s still in the park.  We committed to keeping the bus.  Instead of spending a lot of money to trade it in for something else, we decided to commit less than that to refreshing it.  The exterior is done.  The interior is done.  (I’ll send out some photos later.)  Next we’ll get a muffler back on it.  Then, a couple mechanical fixes and the refurbish will be complete; good for another 10 years!  We set a new year-record with birds, finishing with 422; way over our prior record of 407.  Comparing our number of species sighted to others on eBird, we came in 14th in our County, Hidalgo.  69th in Texas.  241st in the U.S.  And 2,117th in the World.  We have a world-ranking!  We’re number 2,117!  So that’s how we finish 2016, as number 2,117.  We’ll see how we measure up in 2017.  J