Golf, My Birthday, and Dinner out

January 19 - 24, 2014

For the past 10 or so days the weather has been great.  We still have pretty cool evenings after the sun goes down though. Mostly the temperatures have been in the low 80s with the nights being mid-50s.  So there is a lot of activity in the day time and not much after dark, outside anyway.

Tuesday the 21st the temperature was to be a little cooler, in the mid-60s, so we decided to play some golf.  There are lots of golf courses around here; we just needed to find one where we could get a deal.  We never want to pay full price! Patty did the research and found one for $54 for both of us with a cart.  There are better deals but this was a nice course about 10 miles from the RV Park.  

Before we went to play golf we needed to go to a jeweler in Weslaco TX where Patty had taken a ring of hers on Monday. The ring is one that I bought her in Sao Paulo Brazil 13 years ago.  The ring has 2 teardrop-shaped garnet stones from Brazil and one of the stones fell out.  She was hoping to have a new stone put in to match the other one still in the ring.  The jeweler showed her several new pieces of garnet which all looked better than the one still in the ring.  So we decided to have the ring reset with 2 new pieces of garnet and they would try to save the original if they can.  The ring will be ready in 8 – 10 days.

The golf course, Los Lagos golf club, is located in Edinburg on the east side.  The course is part of a housing development in the middle of farm land.  Probably the farm owner sold the land a few years ago to a developer.  The houses are very nice and what you would expect around a golf course.  The big difference is that the houses are selling in the low $100k range according to the advertisement sign out front of the club.  WOW, it's cheap here!

The course itself is pretty challenging and was well maintained with a very nice concrete cart path.  The thing we didn’t like was that the concrete path most times was nowhere close to the fairways or to the greens.  They have a 90 degree rule for the carts but it was very difficult to adhere to this due to the limited access to the fairways.  So we did a lot of driving the cart on the edge of the fairways and also doing a fair amount of walking; walking was fine though and we had fun.

One of the houses on the golf courses.

Patty hitting a ball.

Black ducks on the course.

We haven’t golfed since the fall with Patty’s Uncle Kenny and Aunt Phyllis so we were not real good.  Really though, I shot a 105 which is just 5 over what I do if I play a lot which is not good to begin with.   We do have fun playing though.

After the golf outing we headed into Elsa for some dinner. We went to a Mexican place called Obee’s that was recommend to us by someone from our RV Park.   The salsa was fresh and was pretty hot, just the way we like it.  I didn’t order Mexican; I ordered the chicken fried steak.  It was very good and reminded me of home cooking in Indiana where I came from.  It came with mashed potatoes that were real actual mashed, not whipped, potatoes.  The whole thing is covered in gravy that was made with animal fat, probably lard, the way gravy should be made!  

Patty ordered a shrimp dish that was outstanding!  We can’t remember the name of the entree but it was something like contra azur and I can remember how it was made.  The entree is made up of 6 jumbo shrimp filled with cheese, like mozzarella, then wrapped in bacon and rolled in a very fine corn flour and then deep fried.  These things were to die for! Yum!

The yummy bacon wraped shrimp.

The following day, Wednesday the 22nd, was my 57th birthday!  It was a nice 85 degree day with just enough clouds to offer some relief once in a while.  I got up and went to the kitchen to find a nice card from Patty and a gift of new lounge pants and T shirts that I like.  My birthday was spent mostly in the volleyball pool in the afternoon and then at the outside bar for Wednesday happy hour.  Happy hour usually draws around 60 people starting at 4 pm.  During the happy hour it was announced that today was my birthday and everyone sang happy birthday.  It was a good day!

Thursday the 23rd was the last of our good weather streaks.  We started our day of walking the park as usual but we (Patty) got side tracked.  There are 3 people in the park that make and sell cut T-shirts for women.  Each person has different style of shirt and one even has shirts for guys too. 

On our walk we stopped in to see 2 of the 3 cut shirt people.  Patty ordered a couple of shirts from the first and one as a gift for our friend Cindy in NJ.  The second cut shirt place we went to she tried on several different styles and bought one and placed an order for another one.  All in all we spent a good 3 hours on our 40 minute walk!

That night we sponsored a game night of Left Center Right (LRC) in the clubhouse.  LCR is a fast paced gambling dice game that is real simple to play.  The game can be played with any number of players but the more players the better the experience.  

We only had 4 other people show up so it was a real fast night.  The cold front that hit the Midwest and Northeast finally made it down to us here in South Texas just a few minutes before the start of the LCR game at 7 pm.  Nobody wanted to come out in the weather after the front passed through.

It’s weird here when a front comes through.  It is like night and day with the weather here.  You can actually see the front in the form of clouds coming towards you.  Anyway, it was 80 degrees at 1 pm and then went slowly down to 75 by 6 pm. Then all hell broke loose at 6:45 pm!  The wind went from a calm south breeze to a 30 MPH cold north wind with rain.  The temperature dropped to 50 by 7:30 pm and then slowly to 35 by midnight.  We lost 45 degrees in less than 10 hours time.

Today, Friday the 24th, the temperature didn’t get above 41 as it is as I write this at 4 pm.  We have bean soup cooking in the crockpot for dinner.  Since it is so cold today the park hosted a games day at the club house with several soups for lunch.  We went over for a while and had lunch and played a couple games of corn hole.  Before going over to the clubhouse we went to Weslaco TX to get Patty’s repaired ring.  We were surprised that it was done so quickly.  The ring looks better than when I bought it in Brazil.  The replacement garnets are so much better looking than the originals.

The original Brazilian garnet is at the top of the ring with the new sparkling garnets.

Tomorrow is supposed to be cold again, just not as cold as today.  We should get up to the mid-60s.  Not sure what we will do tomorrow, maybe wash clothes, borrrr…ing! Tomorrow night is darts night which is always fun.  

We may work some more on our travel plans for next year too.  We are starting to rethink our winter destination for next year and may come back to south Texas again.  We would stay at the other clothing optional park, Sandpipers Resort instead though.  

We are starting to think that we MAY make South Texas our constant winter destination in the future at one of the 2 clothing optional parks here.  We really like our current park, Natures Resort.  However, we want to try out the other park before we make up our minds about which park to winter in. 

The natural progression for people is to winter seasonally meaning 3-4 months for a few years and then “buy in”.  “Buying in” really means making a commitment for an annual site and then either making improvements to it or just purchasing an existing improved site.  The cost for either seems to be in the $40 – 80k depending on the site and improvements.  Right now we are not ready to “buy in” but we may decide to settle on a constant winter site, at least for a while.

Our old (1-1/2 year!) extra step needed to be replaced!

The welds broke on all 4 legs of the old step.  The step is supposed to be designed for 1000 lbs.

New extra step was delivered this week.  This step is a little heavier and is riveted instead of welded.

Stay tuned!