I'm baa-ack!

Big Bend National Park was wonderful! If you have an opportunity to go there, by all means, take it. It is a place of mostly untamed, stark, and varied  beauty. Much of the 801,000 acres of the park are untouched by human activities and are havens for the wild things that live there. The parts of the park that are easily accessible for humans are the parts that we visited and there is plenty there to keep a visitor busy for weeks, or even a lifetime.

I have about a million pictures - well, four hundred, anyway - from the trip, and I'll be posting some of them here and on my other two blogs in coming days, but for now, I just wanted to let you know that I'm back and that my garden survived very well in my absence. My daughters took turns looking after things for us while we were gone and they did good!

When I walked out to the backyard this afternoon, one of the first things that I saw was a beautiful longwing Julia butterfly on the jatropha blossoms. Of course, I didn't have my camera in hand so I ran back inside to get it, but by the time I returned the butterfly had disappeared. I'm hoping it will stick around and give me another chance because Julias don't show up in my garden that often. It's an event when they do.  Its appearance today felt like a gift from Mother Nature to welcome me home. If only she could have warned me to have a camera handy.