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Friday morning dawned cold and cloudy.  Not what I wanted for our Vanishing River Cruise.  I assumed that we would be out in the open the entire time.  Luckily, I was wrong on many counts.

I bundled the kids up as well as I could.

The girls were bundled in parkas we had from previous assignments in colder places, but poor Brother had to make do with what we had in layers.

We walked down to the dock and climbed on board.  I was so relieved to find that the lower deck was enclosed and heated. 

We spent much of our time downstairs, but we did venture up occasionally.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good zoom lens for my camera (it’s on my wishlist along with a good macro lens) so the pictures are not great.  And, the pictures are a bit cloudy because of the windows.  Anyway, we still did get to see the many and varied birds on this lake and I was not too stressed about the children either falling down the stairs or into the water.

These trees contain nests for the Great Blue Heron.  These birds were everywhere.  Here’s one in flight.

That tiny white dot in the middle of the water is a pelican.  I thought it was pretty cool to see.

The highlight of the ride was seeing the eagles.  Now, I did not get a shot at all of the eagles.  These eagles were only about 2 years old based on their size and color.  The tour guide said that the eagle’s heads don’t turn white until they are older so it was easy to see that these particular eagles were adolescents.  It was fascinating.  Now, you may wonder why the eagles were in Texas.  Well, apparently, they travel to our region when the rivers up north freeze.  Apparently, these particular eagles were not informed about the bitter cold this week.

And, here we are on the top deck.  We only stayed up here for a few minutes.  The stress was too much.  Pumpkin wanted to climb all the chairs and Honey wanted to watch the water from the top of the stairs.  Brother wanted to sit up on the storage lockers near the railing.  Sister was fine, but I didn’t want to leave her there by herself.

We had a lot of fun.  I wish I could’ve taken some better pictures.  The birds were fantastic to watch.