Of course, the bunny finds Willa here in the desert! The day starts with a fun egg hunt filled with challenges and clues to find a hidden basket. She thoroughly enjoys it. The basket includes eggs to decorate and cookie cutters shaped like a bunny and a carrot, some other small toys, candy and a chocolate bunny. Willa and I start with the egg coloring and decorating and Kent is making pancakes shaped like carrots and bunnies. Yum. We spend our last day together finishing Easter activities and just goofing around in camp.
Homeward bound
Willa and I are flying back to New York. We make the 2-hour drive to Vegas Sunday evening and stay in a hotel there to make the 6:00AM flight a bit more manageable. Willa entertains me with an egg hunt she sets up for me and we read a little then off to bed. We need to be up by 3:30AM. Note to self, if you want to sleep at all you cannot share even a queen size bed with Willa. She is a whirling dervish. I had feet and arms in my face off and on all night. I don’t think I slept more than an hour in a stretch! We are up as planned and excited to soon see Mom and Dad. We stand in line and make our way through security and to the gate. With an hour to kill and having had no breakfast we share a giant Cinnabon. Delicious! Flight one is long…4 hours so a bit of WIFI brings an hour or so of Moana. Our layover in Charlotte flies by as Willa meets another 5-year-old and they happily play the whole time. She sleeps from wheels up to landing on the leg to Albany. On the ground she finds Daddy at the airport and soon Mom at home. All is back as it has always been and should be. I’m pretty sure she had a great time with us though and I know that Kent and I certainly enjoyed ourselves. Now we’ll rest up!
When we arrived at Tindi we traded our lower 48 winter gear for the real thing. Seems part of the “wilderness float(ski) plane” rules require everyone to be in Survival gear and here that means -35F. Our plane for the trip was a historic/legendary twin Otter. Before we boarded the aft of the plane was loaded with food and supplies for the lodge including fuel for the generator and snowmobiles.
Each year volunteers construct an ice castle and figures on the lake. The only non-ice items I saw were a couple of wooden doors. The Castle is open for the month of March then demolished and left to melt back into the lake during the spring thaw. An amazing community event.
It is lovely as we watch the sunset from a bench along the channel then the bridge lights come to life. Sunburned and tipsy beach goers make their way back into town on foot and via greatly overloaded boats on the channel. The night is still young for some. We make our way back to the ferry dock and home across the lake. Nice.
a large turbo-prop slides by low over the lake. He banks hard nearly overtop us once then again. By the third pass I realize it is a wildfire fighting tanker and he is out on a training run. It is a great perspective to watch as they first do touch and goes on the water then pick-ups then scoop and drop. Very cool.
The burros are here snacking on hay pellets now instead of carrots and decidedly less pushy than I recall. 
burros and check out the poppies. It is magnificent. Clusters of bright orange California poppies dot washes and combine to create blankets of color that seem to splash up hillsides. We off-road on a two track (we can do that now in our high clearance 4-wheel drive pick-up…nice) then walk to make our way toward a lovely orange bloom. It is amazing the dozens of other flowers found along the way. If you are in the desert in the spring, get out and walk (carefully of course).
60 ft boardwalk to the bunkhouse at the office complex. We did this one entirely on our own and it came out pretty nice – we think so and so did the Refuge staff. Tear out was good practice for a later project to remove a much longer boardwalk on a trail further out in the Refuge.
In total we hung or rehung 8 signs. All looking good!
(or at least persistently present) in a low fork of a live oak along the entrance road, a guard alligator who lolls on a small dock at the entrance, and a determined cottonmouth who now guards the boardwalk out at San Bernard Oak. The wintering geese showed up too, the white-fronted and the snow geese. Sandhill cranes and Roseate Spoonbills as well.