Breezy day

We had an early morning visit from one of our local neighbors; a road runner. Our camp hosts have named them all "Beep Beep". They always bring a smile to our faces with the way they walk and the way their top notch and tail stand up and go down.

I mentioned yesterday that the park isn't very full. The loop that we are in is empty with the exception of us and the other loop is empty. All of the other rigs are back off the main road. John took a picture showing how alone we are. We look like we are out boondocking all by ourselves. Everyone at the potluck on Sunday laughed at us when we commented about being all alone. They said they were back where it wasn't as windy. John thinks they get the same amount of wind but that their orientation is more head on whereas ours is more sideways to the wind. When we move, we are going to do something about that.

I had signed up for a Webex training program through Workkamper.com on a campground reservation system. While I was tied up with that during noon, John went for a bike ride. He came across what he thought at first was a dog but soon realized that it was a coyote crossing the road. John must have startled the coyote because John said the coyote tucked his tail between his legs with his rump down as he ran across the road just like a dog would do if scared.

Once I had finished with the course, we had to run into town for some groceries. By the time we got back home it was 4:30 p.m. Where does the day go?

As the clouds had rolled in, we were treated to a pretty sunset.

About ten minutes later, this is what the sky looked like. Beautiful isn't it?
As we are due for 50 to 60 mile an hour winds again over Wednesday and Thursday, the satellite will be down so that means there will be no journal entries. Not that anything interesting will be happening when you are just trying to hang on.

Bosque de Apache National Wildlife Refuge

Having another beautiful day, we planned to take a trip north to visit the Bosque de Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is the winter home to roughly 17,000 Sandhill Cranes as well as a multitude of geese, other waterfowl, and raptors. Thousands are drawn here to watch the cranes fly out to feed and the fly in to roost. It must be an amazing sight.

The refuge has a 12 mile, one-way graded road, with two additional loops to tour April to October. As the cranes have long been gone from the refuge, we were treated to shorebirds and waterfowl. The refuge seems to be intelligently run using water from Rio Grande through channels where they can flood fields or dry fields for planting of corn and alfalfa. The Visitor Center was interesting and they played us a 15 minute video about the refuge that was very interesting.

Here you are in the middle of nowhere out in the New Mexico desert and low and behold here is all sort of wetlands.

We spotted this little buck feeding.
Here are some herons and cormorants just enjoying a beautiful day.
This guy is a Cattle Egret (a new bird for us).

We really enjoyed the refuge even though the "stars" have gone north. If we are ever in the area November through mid-March, we would certainly stop in the area.

After the refuge, we headed north to Socorro in search of food. We drove past a Mexican restaurant that had a number of cars in the parking lot so John pulled in. Actually, the meal was good and they served sopapilla's with the meal. Sopapilla's are fried dough that you open up, put honey inside, and eat. So good (not good for you) and we really enjoyed them. We ate ours for desert but they were meant to be like bread for the meal.

From there we headed to Elephant Butte to see if our mail had arrived which it had. It is always fun see what the mail brings.

Thankfully, I have put our meal in the crock pot before we left for the refuge so dinner was taken care of after we got home. I'm am still enjoying the sound of silence but soon we will be back with strong winds revisiting us.

Our time here in Elephant Butte is almost up. As there is no place in New Mexico safe from the winds and we don't need to be in Albuquerque until the 17th, we have decided to stay here for another week as the rent is cheaper than we could get anywhere else. We will need to pack up, go to the dump station, and pick out a non-reserved site for the next week. We are hoping to chose one that won't have us side on to the winds. We need to move as our site is reserved for the weekend. It appears that all of the reservable sites are booked for the weekend so it should be interesting to see this place jumping as more sites are empty that they are full.

Silence . . . yahoo!

We woke up to silence. Oh, what a wonderful sound.

Our camp hosts had invited us to a pot luck at noon today with some other of our campers here in the park. The food was bountiful and the company was very nice. Most of the campers knew one another from prior years and we were the only newbies. The other Excel owners were there so we got to meet them which was nice.

We spent the rest of the afternoon lazy around outside enjoying the warm sun and NO WIND! Early in the evening we got caught up with Melissa and her busy life. Just as we said our goodbyes and hung up, John got excited when he looked out the window and saw a large raptor fly in and land in the bushes down near the water's edge. As it was getting dark, we stepped outside with our binoculars and I told John that it looked like the shape of Great Horned Owl. He agreed and about that time, the owl flew out of the bushes down toward the water and out of sight. That was a nice treat.