Morning maintenance: house cleaning, bank cleaning, butterfly files updates, and calling State Farm about the rock that flew up off the road into our windshield. They said to wait until we returned to Gainesville.

After all the daily stuff we drove an hour to a splendid day at Estero Llano Grande State Park, the center of the network of parks that make up the World Birding Center here in the Rio Grande Valley. We added 5 birds to our lifelist (now 346, with 28 new birds on this trip), which is fun, if one is in scorekeeping mode, but that’s not really the point. What is the point? You figure it out.

The day was at last cool (72), the sky brightly clouded, the wind somewhat abated, and the crowds from the nearby Birding Festival dispersed. And the park itself is a delight, user-friendly paths and boardwalks and a splendid viewing deck right outside the Visitor’s Center. We are planning to return early Wednesday morning for a guided bird walk.

Some highlights:

We adjourned at around 4:30 for dinner at the Blue Onion, just down the road - which for us meant asking for directions twice and making one U-turn. Dinner was excellent - the best we’ve had here, but the coffee was so bad that Kim couldn’t finish hers and I only drank two cups.