Short Jaunt to an Oasis

(Dad's turn) On Monday, 2/11, we didn't make it that far down the road (only 62 miles) before we stopped, set the chock blocks, and rolled out the slide. We'd planned to just come to Lake Patagonia for a picnic before proceeding up to Tucson. Wow, this is really a gem. We found a great back-in slot at the head of a birding trail with an awesome view of the lake. (Note: this is a big phobia for us since we've been picking RV places based on whether they have "pull-thru slots" available.) Usually Paula directs me as I pull into a parking slot for the night, but this time we tried something different: I directed and Paula pulled right back into it. It's a little bit of a slope (3 leveler blocks), so we couldn't even disconnect from the 5th wheel. If any of you have seen our rig connected, you can imagine that's quite a slope to live on! But it was pretty funny too. The boys pretended we were capsizing and had a big time with our predicament.

We decided to explore the park and take a tour of the small museum they have here. The boys got to hear about the more than 250 species of birds that live in this area. They also had some native snakes, a gila monster, and some guest corn snakes (non-native) too.

They were really excited when they saw this display because it looked like their favorite Perigrin Falcon, but it turned out to be a closely-related cousin, the Grey Hawk. It's a beautiful bird with grey feathers.As we left the museum, we got within 10 yards to a real-live Perigrin. He just sat there and looked into the camera before SWOOOPING off.

Right before sundown, we went on a nice hike along the nature trail in front of our campsite. We listened to the swooping red-winged blackbirds against the reeds of the lake as they hunted insects. It was unreal -- it sounded like we were at the beach and waves were crashing against the shore. (I wanted to post a video to our blog, but this feature doesn't seem to be working correctly). We also caught glimpses of some deer in the woods.

As it started to get dark, we made our way back to our campsite and cooked up some hot dogs, beans, and s'mores.
It was a chilly night, but we cuddled up to the fire, and talked, laughed, as the stars came out against a black velvet sky. It was truly magical end to another magical day on the road.