Since we were late to the grand flower opening at home this spring, we may have missed some of the cactus and other blooms in our xeriscape garden, but, not to worry – there are plenty more flowers coming soon. Verna snapped this photo today of a prickly pear cactus flower on the west side of our yard near the fence line. There were several flowers open today and there will be many more over the next few weeks.
Keep an eye out for more flowers when they show up here.
Happy 104th Birthday in Heaven to Kate (1920-2013). This photo taken in July of 2013 a few months before she passed into her Heavenly repose. We miss her still.
We arrived at our campground today without incident. We drove straight through the planned route and stopped only once in Alamogordo to take on fuel.
We were pleasantly surprised that our campground RV park is elevated above the southwest end of the city of Las Cruces – actually a pretty big town in this region of New Mexico. In the image above, you can see our rig parked with the mountain ranges in the distance and the urban sprawl below.
Later this evening, Verna and I took a walk down to the front of the park where there is an overlook of the area. I used my S23 Galaxy phone to photograph the city lights:
In the above image, you can dimly see the mountain range beyond the city we crossed coming here today. We also crossed the Rio Grande River, which flows through the area on its way to the Big Bend and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, where we were just a few days ago.
Click on either image to open the image viewer.
Image: Llano River next to the RV Park – Click to enlarge.
We’ve actually been here at the Llano River RV Park since yesterday. We decided to have a more relaxing weekend on the road.
We had some good meals while camping here; we had grilled pork tenderloin on Saturday and grilled Filet Mignon steaks today. Not too bad at all!
Next, we will be headed to Fort Stockton, TX, where we will be doing some provisioning from the local supercenter. We also will be stopping here in Junction to take on Diesel for the RV.
We’re looking to be home by the end of this new week.
What we anticipated to be a dismal forecast for the weather on Eclipse Day, turned out to be not so bad, especially during the totality phase. Clouds passed between us and the sun often, but then opened up for partial phase glimpses and during totality, most of the four minutes of darkness, we were able to see the corona and in the image below, a couple of prominences at two-thirty and five-thirty on the disc. The 5:30 prominence was huge.
I wasn’t very well-prepared to take photos given the woeful forecast, which affected my motivation, but I was able to attach the big 100-400mm telephoto lens and shoot bunches of photos hand-held (no tripod) and had a few fair results including the one above. Verna had similar results and captured the “Diamond Ring” at the end of the totality show:
As I’m blogging this, we are getting some moderate to heavy thundershowers with lightning and thunder, but, Praise the Lord, no tornadoes. The precipitation knocked out the satellite TV a few times, but it is up and running now.
We’re here until Wednesday and then off to other parts of Texas south of us towards the Gulf of Mexico and thence via westerly routes heading back to Arizona over the next several days.
Just across the creek from where we are camping, we saw a flock of sheep, two llamas and a sheepdog watching over them all. I took these photos just before sundown this evening.
Click on any image to enlarge.
