When you live through the torrential rains that are occasionally unleashed on Southeast Texas, the concept of a desert can be hard to grasp. This is of course truer for young children who have never seen a desert landscape in person. While we are used to thinking of deserts as hot - and the areas we went through certainly met that portion of the definition - deserts can also be very cold. What they are boils down to a lack of precipitation - not a temperature range.