“We have all winter”.  We say that a dozen times when we arrive at a new winter destination and start getting to know our work camping compadres. We sit around in the afternoon after work and talk about all the things we want to do during the winter before we all flock and head back north. The list becomes long, but we don’t fret to much about because… ‘we have all winter” to do this or that.

As I sat outside having my tea this morning about 6:30 a.m.;  I noticed that the songs of the birds around my site have changed. Warblers are warbling, the Kill Deers are gone and the most noticeable to me is the solitary Red-Wing Blackbirds are now in flocks, preparing for their journey north. Pelicans, who have been abundant all winter on the Resaca behind our sight, are thinning. Not unlike us. I am checking more people out than in at the RV office and my time at the pharmacy, where I have been keeping the books this winter is almost done. We are 4 weeks from lift off. We aren’t packing up just yet, but our minds are definitely in flight mode.

Our days for this season at Llano Grande number under thirty now. We are coming back next winter. We did secure a north facing site, a few streets over, to keep the winter sun from beating in the windshield of the motorhome and turning the front cap into an oven. We are already talking about things we will do next winter that we didn’t get around to this year.  I have a short list of people to see one more time before we leave. There is something about this snowbird lifestyle, six months here, six months there that really make the years start to tick by fast. By fast I mean, NHRA fast, not 70 MPH on the Interstate fast.

We left our kids and grandkids in October with the 5-month absence seeming like an eternity. Then we blinked and woke up this morning are realized our 4^th winter season away from the Midwest is almost over. We will arrive back in Iowa at our nest at good ole’ site number seven in volunteer village in about 40 days. We’ll get together with friends and family and talk about what we want to do next summer and say the same thing we said in November, here in the Rio Grande Valley. “We have all season”. One would think after 4 seasons we would start to realize how quickly it will go. Time will tell.

Until next time…