"Podding" in Paradise: Odds & Ends

So, yes we are still camping in Texas, but we are departing by Monday, the 11th, heading north to Minnesota and hopefully cooler temperatures.

The days are hot, in the mid- to upper- nineties. Humidity is up there too. Very little rain lately. However the sky is beautiful during the day and super starry at night!

We enjoy lots of butterflies and dragonflies here. Here's a common buckeye butterfly and a dragonfly that is yet to be identified.

Michael continues to cook outdoors and right now is cooking a BBQ sauce that smells heavenly! He made homemade granola the other day which tasted great and sliced up a watermelon we bought roadside from the back of a truck - sweet and juicy!

I recently had a new Native American style flute in the key of G crafted for me by a wonderful artist, George Dyson Jr. It is aromatic cedar and Osage woods and has a gorgeous rich voice.

Nevelle is enjoying the forest and camper as much as we do. He's an amazing camping and traveling cat! We couldn't be happier with our sweet boy!

One of the challenges of boondocking is not having hook-ups for water and electricity. Our new rpod has a holding tank for 30 plus gallons of fresh water. At a campground we can hook up to a water source with our hose and easily fill the tank, but here in the national forest there isn't a water supply. Well, my brilliant husband remembered how to siphon water from his youth, and that's just what we do to replenish our fresh water supply.

We fill 3 or 4 of our 3.5 gallon waterbricks in town and then hoist them up onto the car roof when we get back to camp. Then with a hose that Michael fixed up with 2 valves, we get the water flowing from the waterbricks, through the hose, and right into the tank!

We hung a hummingbird feeder with nectar and have had our first visitors! There are at least 2 hummers and in the photo below, one is to the right of the feeder.