Mission, Texas

Friday January 16, 2009

The cruise from Carrizo Springs to Mission was under clouds. Wide open terrain and a mix of air currents from northern-cold with gulf-warm can make for dramatic skies. It turns out that during the summer this area is one of the real “Hot Spots” for storm chasers. We enjoyed some spectacular rolls of front-lets folding into cells with swirling vertical extensions of rainfall. I'm sure that if about forty Fahrenheit degrees were added we would've seen a really spooky show!


The drive brings us into what is called the Texas tropics. Weather is considerably warmer and everything is green. Palms abound. Hyacinths and bougainvillea decorate yards and "goatheads" hitch rides on our socks! I wouldn't mind quite as much, but indoors they jump off clothing and wait until we kick off our shoes, then they gleefully attack any foot in sight!

We picked a tiny RV park in Mission Texas last night. The park is named Paradise Country RV Park. The rates are great and the place is well kept so we paid for a three night stay. By the time we were plugged in and settled down we'd been greeted by two couples and well mannered doggies on leashes. All were snowbirds glad to meet us and find out about us. They enjoyed sharing their own stories as well. Some folks leave a rig here for the winter. Some take the rig back to northerly states for the summer. Two have put a park model on a lot here, and then fly down for the winter. True snow-birds, eh?

This afternoon three couples invited us to join the Friday night pizza feed. We joined the safari down to the Peter Piper Pizza Parlor for some great food and great conversation. The pizza parlor has special rates for “Winter-Texans”. They offer dollar-off coupons, senior specials, and “bottomless” plastic soda-pop mugs. Nancy, our next-door neighbor, brought extra soda pop mugs just for us and kicked in an extra dollar-off coupon for us too. The hospitality here is truly heartwarming. Supper ended with renewed invitations to the biscuits-and-gravy breakfast tomorrow morning, and suggestions that we really should consider the park for an annual three-month stay.