The Folks and the Mystery Flower - May 10 - May 14

First a little housekeeping as we used to say before every JEA meeting. It's been awhile since we have updated, so now we're catching up! Hope everyone is doing well. I think we are finally getting used to the time difference. We had one day where we went through 2 time zones and gained two hours. By the way if you want to get a better look at the attached pictures, you can click on them and get a bigger view. On with the news...

We arrived in San Angelo on Sunday, May 10, Mother's Day scoring extra points for both of us. Frank's Dad had called earlier in the day and suggested we not eat anything 4 hours prior to arriving since they had a big chicken dinner waiting. And it was good.

We set up Roadie out in the parking lot next to a power pole and dubbed it the "Rio Concho River Resort". It had everything we needed, showers, restrooms and even a restaurant on site. The first day we were there the temperatures were in the mid 70's but it went up every day after that.

We had a good visit. Frank did some computer work for his Dad, we ran errands and we ate. Every day we were there we had at least one buffet meal. And you know us, if it's on the buffet, we gonna try and eat it. Another interesting aside, Frank's Dad is on Facebook and we're not. Hmmmm....we'll have to ponder on that.

And being Putnams, we don't like missing a happy hour, so every day at 4PM we would migrate to Nick's apartment, one of Frank's Dad's friends, to have our adult libations. Being invited to attend was a special honor.



Early in the mornings (well early for us, 9am-ish) we took walks along the Rio Concho River. San Angelo has really developed a nice system of parks along the river which includes a walkway in excess of 4 miles. One morning we spotted what we thought was a piece of brightly colored trash or maybe a flower someone had stuck in a bush along the river's edge. As we got closer it turned out to be a flower and it was attached to the plant. The plants have straight branches ith large thorns every few inches and leaves that are opposing and oblong. There is only one flower per bush/plant. We took pictures and showed them around but nobody seemed to know what these flowers/plants were. One person even speculated that they were tied to the stalks for a wedding. However the flowers were growing from the stalk and not tied on debunking that suggestion. Maybe one of you can identify them?

And one final shot. Along the path we passed beneath a bridge and were treated with a view of a colony of swifts (that's my best guess) making mud nests on the side of the bridge.