Our Vacation Week of Feb. 2 - Feb. 8

Our first week of vacation has been a good restful time after the four weeks of working/volunteering. We ended our last post on our blog after having settled in at Lake Corpus Christie State Park. Had a wonderful three nights here without highway noise. Here we walked several hiking trails and checked out the historic pavilion built in 1933/1934 by the Civilian Conservation Core.

The one feature we liked was the birding blind with its numerous feeders and water features to attract the local birds and the ones migrating through and heading north.

This man-made lake is now used for boating, fishing and camping.

We left here and headed further south close to the Mexican border to Falcon State Park. This was a very different park with a desert feel, very quiet and some wildlife, and  only a few hours drive away from our previous state park.

We hung out grapefruit shells and a bird feeder to attract the birds. We did attract some as well as a herd of javalinas, bunnies and racoons.

We hung our suet feeder for the birds but found it open and empty the next morning and we think it was the racoons.

This park also is a man-made resorvoir  which is a joint US/Mexican project which currently had a low water level.

We hiked the perimeter trail and checked out the butterfly garden that was starting to show some flowers but not many butterflies yet.

This park is known for all the bird watchers that were there. One of our neighboring campers told us about a birding spot at a wildlife refuge preserve near the  town of Salineno close to the Rio Grande River. Wednesday was a cold, windy day and perfect to go and watch the birds feeding at the many feeding stations set up by a volunteer. Definitely worth the trip!

Here is a short video clip of the activity.

After three days at this park we headed to the busy snowbird hangout in the Rio Grande Valley to see family, friends, neighbors and of course more birding. We were invited by our neighbors from back home to join them at the RV park that they are at. While here we did a Costco trip to stock up on Jim's supply of nuts to carry him through till we get home.

This is how some local farmers sell their produce by pulling their wagons through the RV parks.