Birds & Butterflies

We arrived a day early in Mission, Texas on Thurs, Oct 24^th. We are spending two weeks visiting Julie’s sister Cindy and brother-in-law Terry, at the 2,600 acre Bentsen Palm Development, a development on the edge of Mission. We stayed in Retama Village, which has a mix of single family homes, RV port homes, and RV lots with large concrete pads and a casita (one of which we rented from the lot owners who live in Minnesota).   

 

The Mission area is where many “Winter Texans” head to for the winter months with their RVs or to their winter homes here in south Texas. Mission, adjacent to McAllen, is in the Rio Grande Valley and there are several wildlife refuges. Hundreds of different bird species and nearly 300 of 500 butterfly species migrate through the area. We especially enjoyed riding our bicycles to the “World Birding Center Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park” (the top birding sight in the U.S.), about three blocks from our RV site, to see many different species of birds and butterflies.

Green jay

Golden-fronted woodpecker

Great kiskadee

Queen butterflies

Last Sunday, we drove to Port Isabel for their annual World's Championship Shrimp Cook-Off festival, where we enjoyed sampling the various shrimp dishes.  Then we drove across the bridge to South Padre Island to see the gulf and enjoy a drink at a beach side bar.

We joined Cindy and Terry in celebrating their 9^th anniversary last night at dinner.

We leave here tomorrow morning and start working our way east to Florida, where we plan to spend much of our winter in Key West.

Steve & Julie Cornelius