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1 to 15 January 2018 16 to 31 January 2018

Thursday January 16, 2018

The cold front is on us! There is a freezing rain warning for the area.

Here is a play-by-play of the cold front arriving.
We started with 11°C at 7:30 am.

And it keeps dropping...

It will stay in the -1°C / -2°C all night.

This morning I filled the fresh water tank with water and I disconnected the fresh water hose from the MH and the tap so it would not freeze and damage the hose, pressure water regulator and the filter.

The rain started in the afternoon.

Everything is covered in ice.

We are going to bingo this evening. Look at the car?

The MH is not the most isolated RV. It is normal, it is not a house. The propane heaters are running a lot and we still have the electric fireplace going too. we are nice and toasty in the MH.

Wednesday January 17, 2018

Well, we are back up to +2°C before lunch and everything starts to melt.

The arrows are pointing at the ice chunks that fell off the palm tree all night long because of the wind.

This afternoon we are at the Winter Texan Expo in McAllen. It is the biggest in the Valley.

We met Nicole and Marcel. We met them last year when we were camping on the Natchez Trace.
They are in another RV Park in Mission. We should meet again before we leave the Valley.

WOW! A heat wave is upon us! We should not go below zero again.

Thursday January 18, 2018

The wind is still coming from the north, but the temperature should go up over the next few days. We have hit the maximum of +5°C today.

We did laundry after lunch.

We are treating ourselves with a nice Chinese fondue. Michele preparing the devil's sauce.

Hummmm!

Happiness!

Friday January 19, 2018

We woke up to rain!
I have breakfast at a local restaurant and it is good.

Today we made our reservation for the next RV Park we will be going to. From February 8 to March 8, we will be at another Encore Park. This one is the Alamo Palm RV Resort and it is only $299 US for the first month. We will be staying in the Valley until then.

A good day at home.

Saturday January 20, 2018

The sun is coming out and it is getting warmer.
We decided to go and check out the flea market near Brownsville, about 30 minutes from our park.
This is the kind of flea market we like.

There are a few "ropa". A ropa is when the pile cloth on a tarp and you have to "dig" to find a garment you like.

Half of the flea market is covered with a roof.

my lunch. I even put some red sauce on it. It was not too hot, it was good.

I found this "garborator" for only $10. I will make another "pooparator" for the MH. I made two of them in May 2012, but I sold them thinking I would not need one again. I found I need one every now and then when we are camping in Saskatchewan.
For more info on the pooparator, check the May 3, 2012 web page

On our way back from the flea market, we stopped at Harbor Freight Tools store to get some tools for Gabriel's new toolbox for this summer.

He gets a hammer, pliers, measuring tape, frontal light, a screwdriver, magnet and a long pincher.

A good day.

Sunday January 21, 2018

Boy are we relaxed!
Another day taking it easy. We still went to the club house to do some internet search. Why take our internet when we can take the park's internet for research. The rest of the day was easy with reading, TV and just plain doing nothing.

Monday January 22, 2018

Michele is at the Thrift Store and I am looking for geocaches close by. My average is not very good today. I only found one out of four. Those two did not like that I was near the pond.

Michele suggested we have lunch at the Golden Coral. A very good idea.

Tuesday January 23, 2018

We are out geocaching after lunch. We are at a small park in Harlingen.

We are still in the city limits. Some nice cactus.

One cache was under this group of palm trees.

Every time we have to go under some trees we wonder if a bug will fall on us.
The cache was a little hard to find because the GPS is not very accurate under trees.
Within ten minutes we found the cache.

More cactus.

We found three out of five caches.

Nothing to add to that!

We went to bingo again tonight, but no winnings for us.

Wednesday January 24, 2018

At the hall meeting this morning they had the United States Border Patrol giving a presentation on what they do.
It was surprising to learn the number of illegal aliens are going through the border here in the Rio Grande Valley. It was very interesting. We also learned why the pull tires behind their truck. It is so the next time the drive here again, they can see tracks and then they know somebody walked on by.

We had light rain all day with a +15°C.

We had a good lunch.

And for supper, we had Beef Stroganoff.

Thursday January 25, 2018

We have a cloudy sky all day with a chance of rain in the afternoon.

RC Racing is very popular in the RV Parks in the Valley.Here too they have one.

I received my replacement light from Amazon today.
I am replacing the one that burnt a few months back.

The man hard at work!

In no times, it is done.

It was less expensive on Amazon then a RV store, so I ordered two so I now have a spare one.

Yesterday at the hall meeting, the Quilt Club asked for help to tie knots on quilts. They are a little behind from their target numbers. They give the quilts to people in needs in the Valley. Michele suggested we come and help them tying knots this afternoon.

We were here for about two hours tying knots. It was not hard, just time-consuming.

We had a little rain in the afternoon.

Friday January 26, 2018

Biking, reading, it is what we did most of the day.

Michele is starting a cold, again. She is not lucky this year.

Saturday January 27, 2018

We are under a double severe warning, the first one is about heavy thunderstorms and the second is about local flash flooding.

The thunderstorm is coming.

We have heavy rain for over an hour.
This is the rain on our sun shade on the windshield.

Water is starting to accumulate on the roads. This is the view from our bedroom window.

This is our street, the manhole is about 3 by 4 feet and it can barely keep up with the water coming at it.

The storm drain cannot handle this much rain in one hour, so flooding happens.

After the rain, it was kind of funny as people were looking for carpets, shoes, anything that floated away with the water.

The water was touching our car tires.

The manhole is under water and the dog is confused.

I am not really nice to Michele, She has a cold and I told her she was cooking tonight...

With all the rain we got, the humidity level is very high right now.

Sunday January 28, 2018

This is over 5 inches of rain water in the bucket. All that in just a little over an hour.

Some of the damage caused by RV in the Park.

This MH was just standing there and it started to sink because of the rain. The dirt got soft because of all the rain.
It took a tow truck to pull him out.

A day of biking, reading and chatting with people.

Monday and Tuesday, January 29 and 30, 2018

WOW! Two days without photos!
What is up with that!
It simply means they were quiet days.

We did make a few calls to RV Parks around Corpus Christi, but because it will be Spring Break in March, they all are full.

Regardless, life is good for us.

Wednesday January 31, 2018

We have a big day ahead of us.

We are going to SPI (South Padre Island) for the Port of Brownsville boat tour.

We had to go through Port Isabel. We were in SPI in January 2012.

The long bridge.

SPI, here we come.

The boat tour is not until 12:30 and it is only 10 am. We do some shopping in the "Beach Stores" in town.
Nice hats!

After the shopping, we head for the beach for a walk.
Pretty Michele.

There are not many people on the beach this morning.

We were lucky, we saw two fishermen catch fish.

Lunch is at the "Padre Island Brewing Company".
We had a coupon for Fish & Chips for two persons for only $12.99. There is not much fries, but lots of fish.
It was a very good meal.

Our boat for the tour.

Another boat tour is leaving at the same time as us. This one is a fishing cruise.

What a nice surprise, we have free beer during the boat tour.
A shrimper coming back to port.

For about ten minutes, three dolphins followed in the boat wake.

Here in Texas, they don't seems to worry too much about pipelines. This is a new 42 inch LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) coming from the entrance of the channel to the port of Brownsville (17 miles).
Why are the trucks on a barge and not on the road?
It is actually cheaper to barge the trucks than the trucks going by road to their destination because of the long detour by road.

These are the only photos of the inside of the port. The Port is a no photo area.
The tall structure you can see in the distance are part of oil platforms being worked on. The ships are waiting to be dismantled.

At the entrance of the Port of Brownsville is the marina for shrimping boats also known as shrimpers.
The two shrimpers on dry land are being worked on. The one on the water is like a mini shrimper and it is used to catch baits for the fishing industry.

We liked the name. More shrimpers.

Since we could not take photos in the port for security reasons, I went on the internet and got photos of the port???? What security?
Here is how they dismantle a ship. The ships are first brought to the port and placed at the dock in the port, like the two ships you can see pointing in the same direction.There they are cut in large pieces that are removed by cranes and dismantle into smaller pieces. The ship on the left is in the process of being dismantle. Once they are at risk of sinking, they are bushed up the smaller channel, like the three you can see here. As the ships are further dismantle, they are pushed up the slope at the top of the photo until nothing is left of the ship.

On either side of the channel are two aircraft carrier being dismantle.

Now you can see ships pushed at the end of the small channel and almost completely dismantled.

More aircraft carriers being dismantled.

The channel from the gulf of Mexico to the port of Brownsville is dredged to a depth of 42 feet and will be dredged to 52 feet very soon. The sand hills you see next to the channel is the sand removed from the channel.

Back in SPI, we went by a community on an island.

Every house has water access.

The community is connected to the main land by a bridge with a pivoting section to let boats and ships go by.

Life is good in SPI.

We really enjoyed our tour of Port of Brownsville. We left the dock at 1 pm and got back at 5 pm. To top it off, the employees were giving you beer all the time. I had two beer and put six in our back pack, not bad for a $20 per person for the tour.

When you are near a beach, you have "beach stores". They are souvenir and beach article type of stores.

This beach store is about 10 miles away from the beach, but on the road to the beach. To attract customers, they use prehistoric animals.

It was closed.

Going west to get home.

We really enjoyed our day.

Until next time.

Life is good...