Saturday, December 11, 2010

Birds, Butterflies, and Friends

We got up this morning and got ready to bike with Hardy and Judy. As we were walking around the park noticing the wind blowing, Judy called to say that she didn't want to ride with so much wind--the flag at their clubhouse was standing straight out.

As we continued our walk, we stopped to talk with fellow Excel owners, Tim and Roseanne. They have a big heavy duty truck pulling a 36 GKE and carrying a Smart Car. We are fascinated with this setup, and they were glad to tell us all about it.

Judy called to let us know some sad news. Juanita, G.W.'s mom, passed away last night suddenly. The news was a shock, especially since we were just with her yesterday at G.W.'s birthday party and she was so upbeat and seemed to be doing so well. It's always tough to lose your mom, and we really feel for G.W. and David and Hugh. We sent them some photos Ken took yesterday at the birthday party

Juanita chuckles over one of G.W.'s cards

We decided to bike over and check out the progress on getting the state park open. It's still open only to the ebony grove. Taking that brief ride made me aware of a rattle in my bike, which turned out to be the rear fender vibrating against the fork. I stabilized it with some Handi-Tak (almost as essential as duct tape). We saw some chacalacas and some green jays.

At lunchtime, Hardy called to say that since the wind had died down, it looked like good biking weather. We grabbed a sandwich, and got ready to ride. When Hardy and Judy arrived, we headed over to the state park and biked in to the ebony grove again, along the way seeing chacalacas, green jays, and a couple of Altamira orioles (lovely sight).

Then Hardy suggested checking out a geocache near the visitor center. It was a micro cache, and we spotted it after a brief hunt--a film canister in the entrance hole of a bird house (too bad for the birds).

As we were heading to seek another cache, we came upon naturalist Javier de Leon just starting a butterfly walk, so we joined in the fun. He's the only interpretive naturalist working at the park right now--the same one who led the program we attended a few weeks ago about the flooding. Really nice and knowledgeable. He pointed out lots of butterflies and skippers, including several sulfurs of various kinds and Mexican Longtails and Painted Ladies. If you have binoculars, presumably you can see the hooks at the ends of skippers' antennae. As usual, we saw lots of Queens.



Tonight, we listened to Says You! on the radio and played Rummikub, with Ken pulling ahead in our current series. We're playing to 100.

I made reservations to visit Chris and Annie next April/May, so now we have all our plane trips planned and ticketed.

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