Texas Onion Fest

We attended this festival in Weslaco on Sunday.  The day before we had temperatures here up to 100 degrees, on Sunday the weather dove down into the mid-seventies and we were dealing with a strong wind which blew dust and dirt into our faces.  I think that I would have preferred the clean white snow which was falling down in Missouri on that same day!   Our son Dan wrote us that this is still all do to climate change, however the environmental community prefers to call it "global weirding".

Live cooking demonstrations were on the schedule at the onion festival as well as a salsa recipe contest. The various ingredients for a salsa were on display,  and I just could not pass up the photo opportunity!
We came to the festival primarily to see the Rancho Caballo de Puro Raza Azteca perform.  They are Mexican dancing horses, we may have seen them at the Rose Bowl Parades which we have attended as they have performed in those parades.

Quite a few years ago John and I had seen the dancing Lipzzaner horses from Austria, and enjoyed their performance immensely.  The Mexican dancing horses (one of them is pictured above) were not as spectacular in their routine, but still a joy to watch.  They moved in time very fluidly to the mariachi music, doing some very fancy high stepping and side to side prancing.  The master of ceremonies for the show explained that the horses we were viewing were the Azteca breed; a genetic mixture of American quarterhorse, charro, and Andalusian (of Spanish horse ancestry).
 I was going to close this post at this point, however I do want to mention a hike we took today at the La Feria Nature Center.  At one of the lakes there we caught a wonderful sight of numerous ducks and white pelicans together on the shore.  Among them we were also able to espy a great egret and little egret.  Taking their picture was a bit difficult because we feared they would fly off if we came too close to them.  It will be necessary for you to enlarge the picture in order to appreciate the variety of birds pictured below.

 I will show you another awesome shot I took there;  I was aiming for the long-billed curlew,  but several ducks and a turtle suddenly decided to join the party.  One duck in the background has just his rear in view.