Migratory Birds and other issues of Spring

You become aware of a change in mid-March but it doesn’t get fully underway until after the first of April. Migratory birds are seen on every body of water here in the desert, sometimes even swimming on swimming pools, as they return north for the warm summer after their winter sojourn to Mexico.

One of the largest and amazing is the Snow Bird who actually wintered over here in the Desert Southwest from West Texas to here in the Palm Springs, CA, area. One of the breeds is the Canadian Snow Bird who, due to immigration laws, are only allowed to spend six months here in the United States. Yeah, yeah, Judy and I qualify as snow birds too but we never have to be out of here by a particular date.

Back in January and February you could not have rented an RV Space in this or any other park in the area as they were all full every night. Everyone here during those months had worked the advance reservation system to their fullest benefit, routinely making their plans 90 days in advance. As you can see, most of the sites are now vacant and all planned activity programs have come to an end.Now you can’t find a space in a storage yard as they are full. Many folks, especially Canadians, leave their RV here for the summer since it’s cheaper to store it here than move it back and forth each year.

Now some of the parks are actually preparing to close for the summer season here on the desert. We’ll be moving to one of those (Desert Pools Resort) on the 15th for the last two weeks of their season. Following that we’ll return to the site of all of the photos accompanying this blog article, Catalina Spa and Resort. Both of these are in Desert Hot Springs.

As we continue with warm spring weather here on the desert, the strange and other-worldly cactus plants come into spectacular bloom. Every day now there are more and more amazing and colorful blossoms popping out of some of the least attractive plants imaginable.

Our stay this winter and spring has been very enjoyable in spite of the fact that temperatures ranged considerably lower than average, rain was above average, and we had an inordinate number of extremely windy days with gusts to 50 mph or more. We met up again with good friends, enjoyed some pleasant outings, ate some wonderful food at restaurants that were new to us, and no problems developed with our motorhome requiring repair.

Our plans called for us to be home on 1 May but that may have to be stretched a bit as I’m scheduled for surgery on 18 April, and may need some weeks of recuperation prior to driving home. We aren’t planning on being long delayed, however, in our return to Grass Valley.