Carolyn and Richie.
You may remember Carolyn as the proprietor of Island Woman in Port Aransas. After that they moved down to the Valley in Donna, not far from us. Just this spring, they moved to Canyon Lake.
The weather is comfortable. Lots of nice places around their house to sit and have a visit. They’ve got a couple acres and not another house in sight so it’s a fine view in the back yard.
Deer visit regularly.
Connectivity. We’ve a houseful of streaming devices; phones, tablets, and laptops. The world is at our fingertips. The devices are there. The content is there. But there is a weak link. Connectivity. It seems everything that has a picture or sound requires bandwidth. And what we don’t have while we’re traveling is unlimited data. At home, we’ve got a specific service for internet and it provides unlimited data. But when we’re traveling, our internet is tethered to our phone plan and a jetpack. This setup works great; we get coverage practically everywhere in the country, but there is a limit to how much data we can use each month. After that limit we pay dearly. The carrier offers an unlimited data plan, and we got sucked in to that briefly, but under that plan you can use all the data you want until you reach a certain threshold, and above that amount they throttle the speed to make it essentially unusable. The unlimited plan is not really so unlimited. So while the market drives ever more data usage, we’ll suffer the weak link of supply, until internet is determined to be critical for life as we know it and becomes universal.
Meanwhile, An Egyptian goose family.
Drove the bus a few miles up the road to Texas Coach in Pipe Creek for some long-planned tweaks. Getting out of their way while they work, we took a walk on the Kerrville River Trail.
Followed by a visit with Roger and Mary who just left the Valley for a new home in the Hill Country.
They only just left the Valley and have more stuff still in boxes than they’ve put away yet, but nice to see them again and their new digs. Cool weather and a breeze made for a comfortable visit on their front porch.
To South Llano River State Park
This is one of the coolest places we go. A campground we love, hiking trails galore, a river, ponds, oak forest, and four bird blinds! It would be hard to get much better than that!
Lora’s blind.
Here is what they look like inside.
And the view from behind glass the birds can’t see in.
Agarita blind.
Juniper blind.
Acorn blind.
All the bird blinds are stocked with seed and suet, and they each have an active water feature. Great bird attractors.
Campground and scenery.
To Bandera.
From the wide-open spaces of roadside parking pullouts.
To a crowded commercial RV Park in town.
It’s time to hookup, dump and fill, run some laundry, and take longer showers. We’ll be here for the two weekend nights, then back on the tanks.
There is another named storm, Beta, brewing in the Western Gulf. It has such a wide cone of uncertainty we don’t know if it is going to hit South Texas or not. It certainly looks like it could. It might be another slow-moving rain-maker.
We’ll watch from a distance.
Meanwhile, the Texas Sage is blooming.
