It's Saturday evening, around 6pm, and we're hanging out in the camper.... I'm not saying we wouldn't have come over to the Hill Country if we'd have known it was going to be a scorcher, but y'all, it's HAWT. (RDB says: the humidity is less, which helps, but it's still F#$%ing HOT.)
We left out Thursday after work, and drove right into a pretty intense spring storm. We even stopped off at the Buc-cees for a while to wait out the wind as it roared thru.
You really start to pay attention to weather in a different way when you're hauling a '38 billboard behind you. Slow and steady, RDB drives us with great care - and it's like I've said before: if you wait for weekends when there's perfect weather, you won't be camping all that often. Besides, the sunset we drove into was totally worth the storm we drove thru to get on the other side.
We made it over to the Austin East KOA Holiday after dark, just a stop over so that we didn't have to drive the full 3+ hrs in one evening after a long day at work. I really appreciated the late night check in 'hut' at this KOA and Diesel loved the extra large Kamp K9 (no kidding, it was bigger than our backyard at home!). We were in site #146, easy pull thru as we got there in the evening and simple enough to leave Friday morning.
We took our time heading over to
Inks Lake State Park early Friday afternoon, passing the miles talking about
recent news and how sad we are to see freedoms being taken away.
I've said before that camping is our way to get away from everything that overwhelms us, but sometimes life intrudes and some issues are too big to not be concerned about. Throughout the weekend, several of the women's Facebook groups I'm a member of began to post updates of support, and I feel 100% the same as them.
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| From my RV Chicks Chat group |
We arrive early afternoon, set ourselves up in our site, and went into town to grab a bite to eat. Being that it's Cinco de Mayo weekend we decided to stick with a Mexican food theme (who am I kidding, we'd eat Mexican every night of the week if we could!) and we Yelp'd over to one of the two restaurants in town with decent reviews. The food at
El Rancho was ok, but the service was certainly lacking.
Since we were already in town, we drove over to the Burnet County courthouse.
When it was built in the late 1930s it was considered an "ultra modern" design; the front facades and clean line showcasing the Art Deco style just becoming popular at the time. Like many of the courthouses we've visited in our camping travels, the buildings prior to the one standing here now had been destroyed by fire (some by arson) and rebuilt along with war memorials or other statuary in the surrounding grounds. Though I liked this one for its obvious art-deco styling, the courthouse and town square we visited over Thanksgiving in Hopkins County is still my favorite so far.
Back at the camper, we spent some time avoiding the heat and listening to our mix tapes - I mean Spotify playlists - with Diesel.
Traveling back and forth into town, we had noticed a winery along the way. Checked their hours and decided that could be a fun little add-on to our adventure this weekend, so we drove back over to Torr Na Lochs (roughly translated to Hill over the Lakes) for a wine tasting. It did not disappoint! If for nothing other than the view, it was well worth the stop!
We bought a bottle of their 2019 Fion Gael (white) to enjoy with our lox for brunch on Sunday and made our way back to the camper again in time to enjoy a walk (trying to keep getting my steps in thanks to our team Step Challenge at work this past month!) and a beautiful sunset over the lake.
Saturday morning we made our way over to
Longhorn Caverns State Park - just a short 15 minute drive south - to visit the cave, one of our favorite pastimes. I told Grandma G that every time we go spelunking, it reminds me of Grandpa because I can remember him taking my brothers and me cave exploring near their property in Indiana when we were little kids, sparking a lifelong love of caves and the adventures they represent.
This was a really interesting cave, as it was formed by an underground river running thru the limestone vs the usual dripping and seeping of water that creates lots of rock formations like stalagmites and stalactites. The ceilings in the majority of the cave are smooth and rounded - so different!
Our tour guide, Jordan, did a great job of walking us thru the history of the caverns, including lots of interesting information and cool facts about the cave and the CCC men who worked to excavate the rock debris and build the walking paths that are still used today.
Cool fact: in competition with Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico (they installed an elevator), the parks installed a dance floor in one of the larger rooms, the Sub Terrain Ballroom, and played live music as a 'night club' to attract tourists in the early '30s! Jordan played a small sampling of the Harris Brothers Band, to give us an idea of what that would have sounded like.
Not unlike other caves, there are bats in Longhorn Caverns as well. Interesting info: the bats here are
tricolored bats, and unlike the more commonly known
Mexican freetail bats (think: Congress Street colony in Austin), these bats are more solitary, so you'll only see one or two at a time rather than huddled masses of them all together.
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| Those two little brown dots? Chicken Nugget Bats. ;-) |
Jordan referred to them as "chicken nugget bats" - because that's about how big they are. This time of year, those we saw in the cave would all be male; the females would have been nesting with their young in the nearby trees and may return to the cave after the young had grown and flown.
I couldn't help but laugh when Jordan instructed us, as is usual in a cave, not to touch the walls or formations, but also "please don't put the bats in your pocket and take them home; no bats should leave the cave during this tour; chicken nugget bats should remain in the cave at all times."
Cool fact: a lot of the walls in this cavern are
calcite crystals, which early explorers thought were diamonds. Lucky for us, when they realized it wasn't a precious stone, they left it intact, and there were rooms filled with the sparkly crystals that we could walk thru and explore.
In an area named the "Hollow Diamond" Jordan turned out the room lights and then placed his flashlight against the crystal, in turn lighting the entire room around us because of the refractory properties of the calcite.
Cool fact:
Pareidolia is a term for seeing meaning or significance in shapes that aren't there - think of it like seeing shapes in the clouds floating along in the sky. Jordan taught us this term as we toured the Moon Room, above. Historical maps called it that but there is no record as to _why_ it was named the Moon Room. Jordan then proceeded to point out various shapes and facades that guests had told him looked like one thing or another.
It doesn't take a case of pareidolia to see the feature above looks like dog - it was found in the back of the cavern by the CCC in one solid piece. They wheelbarrowed it to the Queens Throne Room, unfortunately breaking it in two along the journey (wheelbarrows in the 1930s had steel, not rubber, wheels so the dog got the full brunt of the bumps along the way). A repair was made to 'cement' it back together and now it stands in the cave as the Queen's Guard Dog.
Interesting info: in the late '60s, during the height of the Cold War, the Department of Defense sanctioned the cavern as a dedicated nuclear fall out shelter with capacity for ~2000 people. They sent 5 gallon bucket-sized containers that included shelf stable foods and instructions for surviving a nuclear attack. (Glad they had those written out, cause you're not getting cell service 120' below the earth!)
We made our way back out of the caverns, a full mile round trip, and returned to the HOT earth above. Since the cavern was created by an underground river, there isn't much elevation change - it varies from about 50' below surface level at the entrance to 120' below at its deepest. (In comparison: Carlsbad is 1,027' at its deepest). No kidding here, the hardest part of the entire tour was climbing the stairs back out of the entrance (in the heat) and to the visitor center above.
After stopping back by the camper to check on Diesel, we went into town again for a late lunch; yes, we could have cooked at the campsite, but the temps outside were 104* and inside was 84*, so we really didn't want to heat up the place when the AC was already having a hard time keeping everything cool.
Rosita's was definitely worth the trip back into town; it was delicious and the service was great!
Thinking of Diesel and camping - my Facebook memories brought this little treasure up today:
goofball's first camping trip ten years ago this weekend. My goodness, how time flies!
I was looking forward to being at Inks Lake SP because I knew they had
great hiking trails, but with the heat index having us well above 100*, it really put a damper on those plans. I was able to get out late in the evening, in that golden hour before the sun sets, and get up to the top of the Valley Spring Creek Trail. Y'all, it was worth it:
The picture doesn't do this one justice - my tracker showed I climbed five flights of stairs (in 100* heat!) for this photo op!
Sunday morning we slept in, inviting Diesel up onto the bed with us to get just a few more hours (he's an early riser/whiner, regardless of the occasion). RDB wished me a happy fur-baby Mother's Day first thing. Love these little munchkins of ours. Lunch was one of our favorite 'no cooking' meals - lox and deviled eggs (ok, yes, technically the eggs have to be cooked, but when you steam them in your rice cooker it's practically not cooking). And I was right - the white wine from Torr Na Lochs pared nicely with the meal.
We spent about an hour driving around the park for our Park n' Drive video (lots of loops and one ways in this park so it took more time than you'd expect). It wasn't nearly as hot on Sunday as it was Saturday afternoon - which was nice, since we needed to break camp and start the 3.5 hour drive home... eventually. Every time we'd pass a certain tree on the way into the park, I'd have a small case of pareidolia - I kid you not, I kept seeing a teddy bear in the cut trunk of this tree; what do you think?
We will eventually pack up and head home, but right now, I'm finishing up this blog post while enjoying a cranberry mimosa, listening to Van Halen "Why Can't This Be Love," and thinking back on the amazing 13 years I've had with RDB and all the adventures we've had along the way. Babe, there's no one else I'd want to suffer thru the heat and go underground with than you. <3
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Facebook memory from 5 years ago. 5 + 8 = 13 wonderful years!
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We were in Site #212 at Inks Lake State Park, just a short drive outside of Burnet, TX (which several friends wanted to rename "Burnt" or "Burn It" Texas when I posted about the heat this weekend. Ha!). This is an ADA site (only site available when I booked months ago) and so it has a paved walkway to the picnic table and extra wide paved pad for the camper and truck; it's also very level, which made for a quick set-up. RDB was able to back us in without me even having to get out of the truck since there were no obstructions - and no trees, which is part of why it was so incredible hard for our AC's to keep up with the 100* heat this weekend. The bath house is just on the other side of the camper and there's a great view as you're kind of at the top of the hill.
Coming soon!
For more camping photos, go here.
For a drive thru video of the park, go here.
