The Woods and Davidsons enjoyed a fine weekend in southwest Florida.  We enjoyed a walk in Lakes Park, walks, jogs, swims, and great meals at Heritage Cove.  Mark and Mary Helen were blessed to have both sets of parents here. They enjoyed their time in the warmth and returned to a storm in New York on Tuesday.  We resumed our more hum-drum schedule here but made a wonderful canoe trip on that day.  See notes on that below. 

A cold front arrived yesterday uneventfully.  There was a stillness and fog at dawn.  Anne and I (Chuck) worked up a cleansing sweat jogging around Brant Point Circle.  We greeted and chatted with a dozen or so couples and singles walking dogs or themselves along the course.  Usually, in consequence of this being a "senior community," we are the only ones actually running. 

It is dawn at our little house in the forest.  Cloudy and 24 degrees, but only traces of snow among the leaf litter.  Forecasters have annonced that the threatening storm will materialize out to sea and allow Chuck's sister and parents to come up the montain to join our Christmas feast.  Last year heavy snow kept them away.

We are at home and enjoying domestic tranquility so have not posted lately.  Still, a lot has happened since our last post.  We enjoyed a trip to New York State for the wedding and stayed a week reaping the gracious hospitality of the Woods family.  On the Saturday after the wedding we moved the RV to Arrowhead Marina and RV Park on the Mohawk River west of Scotia.  The private park is lovely in a birch grove along the river.  Our friends Jane and Bob arrived to begin a bike tour of the Erie Canal bikeway from Albany to Buffalo. 

Some thoughts for the few readers of this website.  A bit of politics perhaps.  Take it or leave it as you wish.

Our RV, Harley, has returned to home base!  We arrived home in it at about six a.m. this morning, pulled into our driveway, parked, crawled into our bed in the back, and slept for about two hours.  We had completed a marathon run from southern Illinois starting yesterday morning with only brief stops along the way.  After breakfast this morning, we wacked weeds to make a path, opened up the house, and unloaded the camper. 

Whew.  We pause today after two weeks of intensive birding during the "monsoon" season in southeastern Arizona.  The exercise has been demanding, frustrating, and immensely rewarding.  First there was a week at Amado from where we probed the Santa Rita Mountains and the frontier region along Pena Blanca Road.  Last week we joined the Southwestern Wings Birding and Nature Festival in Sierra Vista.  Volunteer and professional guides led us into the Huachuca

We currently reside at the town of Amado in Arizona some 40 miles from the border with the state of Sonora, Mexico.   We find Arizona more focused on the issue of border security than most.  This has lead to controversy, I suppose, but the people here have bigger concerns than criticism from those who think they know better. 

A nemesis bird is one that frustrates a birder's best efforts to observe it by staying elsewhere or out of sight despite best efforts to locate it.  We have had various nemesis birds, and the White-tailed Ptarmigan was working hard for this distinction. 

Coming east for the past month, we finally ran out of Utah.  There we ventured by a multitude of strange rock formations including arches, natural bridges, pinnacles, fins, cliffs, and slot canyons.  Traveling to lower elevations we passed through thousands of feet of sediments that comprise the Colorado Plateau.  This mass of nearly continuous deposits over the last 500 million years was shoved up some ten thousand feet and is now being furiously washed out by the streams that flow