Longhorn Caverns
Posted on | July 20, 2010 | 2 Comments
Well, since the Goat Cave/Karst trip was a bust and J was begging to go and see a cave we decided to make the treck out to the Marble Falls area to see the Longhorn Cavern and do the tour. We packed a lunch and lots of water but not before checking the weather to make sure we weren’t going to get lots of rain. Caves and water? They don’t sound good together.
J and N didn’t know where we were going at first and then they got pretty excited when I told them. They have good memories of their last cave trip so they were looking forward to this one.
I managed my claustrophobia very, very well. I even got over my phobia of high ISO settings on the camera. Even if I did have a flash, which I don’t, they probably wouldn’t have let me use it. No flash other than the “normal” kind, no tripods, no monopods. I think the camera managed pretty well.
Here are a few of the photos but most of them are on Flickr, along with any descriptions I can remember.
This is what you see as you are heading down into the cave:
In the 30s, the cave was turned over to the government. The state of TX brought in the Civilian Conservation Corps to clear out all of the mud in the caves and convert it to allow for the public’s visits. The CCC built the above building along with an administration building and an observation tower.
We were 2nd to the last to make it to the 11 am tour! We made it out of the bathroom with literally just a minute to spare!
From inside the cave entrance area:
Gratuitous “let mommy take your picture” pose and smile:
Yes, gratuitous. They really were worried about getting left behind. The tour guide would turn off the lights behind our group as we went along and kept an accurate head count continuously. He said that three years ago, on the last tour of the day, a guide managed to forget 17 people and locked them in the cave. They got to the entrance using their cell phones as flashlights and were able to call 911. Needless to say, the guide doesn’t work there anymore.
Layers of limestone:
Crystals:
This is a man-made wall that now covers the original cave entrance:
The “room” where we stood was the most used one in the caverns. It served as a meeting room for Apache Indians living in the area and they also hung out to build tools and weapons. During the Roaring 20s, a local who owned the property turned the caves into a speakeasy and the room was used as a dance hall. When the government took over, the CCC built the wall because this entrance allowed too much mud to enter the cave when it rained.
The ceiling, showing layers of limestone:
I did miss the chance to photograph a cave cricket. “Completely devoid of pigmentation because of its environment” as our guide stated, “I’m not preaching evolution folks, this is called adaptation.” He used that phrase “I’m not preaching evolution” a lot.
The lighting in the cave wasn’t bad.
It turns out a few years ago that someone got hurt and sued the state. So they swapped the 40 watt bulbs for ones with higher wattage. Unfortunately, that caused fungus to grow around a lot of the lightbulbs.
There were very few stalactites in the cave and no stalagmites at all. The reason was that the cave was built by rushing water running through relatively “soft” rock. The fast moving rock wouldn’t allow any stalactites to form or grow very long except for the highest parts of the cave.
The black markings on the ceilings were left by bats. Before the speakeasy and CCC days, a colony of Mexican Free-tailed bats lived in the caverns until the noise got to them. The markings were left by the oils on their feet. Dirty feet? Yeah, me too.
From the Rainbow Room, which looks that way because of the colored lights. When the CCC found the room, the guys thought they’d discovered a diamond mine and filled their pockets with crystals. That’s all they were, quartz crystals. This was the boys’ favorite room, by the way.
The “cowboy boot” on the ceiling of the hallway that lead to a chamber where the Confederates used to store gunpowder. They also used the bat guano to make gunpowder. But since the cave was so wet (way beyond damp), the gunpowder couldn’t have worked too well I think.
Back outside, having navigated the cave, the boys imagine themselves in a skateboard park:
In and around what was the administration building, now housing an exhibit that explains the CCC and what they did for Texas parks:
We were going to go hiking on the trail which was a little over a mile but J was tired and hot. “Didn’t we hike in the cave? Wasn’t that a hike?” Point taken.
Investigating the observation tower:
It doesn’t look like they used power tools to fell and mill the wood since it’s covered with hatchet marks:
Words about these stairs: the boys would say “cool”, mom would say “textured” and abba would likely say “rickety”:
Wild Basin Preserve
Posted on | July 16, 2010 | No Comments
Well, we were really supposed to try and find the Goat Cave Preserve. We tried and were attacked by the cave’s hordes of evil mosquito guardians. We ran back to the truck to put on a coat of bug spray. The bugs hovered behind us then, but mom lost the mental will to stay and fight. Those were nasty, big bugs. All I can say is there must be some pudgy bats and chimney swifts this year.
Time for us to buy a toad house or two and build a bat box.
Since that didn’t work out, we headed over to Wild Basin Preserve. Yes it was hot but we wanted to be outdoors, so outdoors we went! Good thing we were armed with Clif bars and bottles of water.
The facility is open to anyone and all they ask is a suggested donation but I forget the amount. With the recent rains, the stream that runs through the preserve was pretty and the little water fall was flowing (note: it’s really a few feet high is all). Anyway, here’s some of what we saw.
Itty bitty meadows of tiny white flowers here and there:
J running ahead of me, way behind his brother, trail map in his hand:
It was my main view:
The water falls were small, like I said. But where do you draw the line between a stream running and water falls?
“MOM! Take our picture!”
“We have to go there now!”
Once, I did get ahead of him. Just once.
I have no idea why he’s grinning. I’m not sure it matters!
Funky.
See? It’s that view again.
J and I got a kick out of the rollie pollie.
I thought it was cute.
The sturdy hand holds to help ford the stream:
I don’t get it.
J saw this picture and said “that looks dangerous!”
Hehe
A few more photos here.
Tres Leches Cake – La Bomba!
Posted on | July 10, 2010 | No Comments
Adapted from The Pioneer Woman’s recipe. Hers is great, but we made changes so it deserves the subtitle: La Bomba!
You can not say something Spanish like that without a hearty !
Ingredients
1 cup All-purpose Flour
1-1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
generous pinch or two of freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
5 whole Eggs
1 cup Sugar, Divided
1 teaspoon Vanilla
1/3 cups Milk
1 can Evaporated Milk
1 can Sweetened, Condensed Milk
1/4 cup milk
ICING:
1 pint whipping cream
3 Tablespoons Sugar
Zest of 1 orange
Mix icing ingredients in a mixing bowl and allow to chill together.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Liberally grease a 9 x 13 inch pan. Make it one with tall-ish sides.
Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon in a large bowl. Separate eggs.
Beat egg yolks with 3/4 cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in milk and vanilla. Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.
Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With the mixer on, pour in remaining 1/4 cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.
Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined. Pour into prepared pan and spread to even out the surface.
Bake for 35 to 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool. You can put it on a serving platter at this point if you like.
Combine condensed milk, evaporated milk, and 1/4 c. milk in a small pitcher. When cake is cool, pierce the surface with a fork several times. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture over the cake and try to get as much around the edges as you can.
Allow the cake to absorb the milk mixture for 30 minutes. To ice the cake, whip 1 pint heavy cream with 3 tablespoons of sugar and orange zest until thick and spreadable.
Spread over the surface of the cake. Chill until you know you’ll explode if you wait anymore. Serve. If you left it in the pan like I do, there’s no real way to make it pretty when you serve it, sorry. Fortunately, it doesn’t really affect how it tastes.
If you have an aversion to orange zest texture, you might be able to get away with leaving the cream and orange zest together in the fridge for a few hours then strain before whipping.
Crafty Boys Strike Again!
Posted on | July 2, 2010 | 1 Comment
We bought our materials yesterday and worked on them today. They were fun! So what if they cost more than those at Old Navy or Target. These are one-of-a-kind beauties!
The stencil is made out of freezer paper. We printed the designs, cut out the parts where we wanted the paint to go, then ironed them on the tshirts (iron set to cotton, NO steam).
Paint on the design. We used Tulip “slick” paints, just red and blue. The shirts are cheapies from Target. For the stars, instead of painting them blue, I used cut outs and painted around them. NOTE: make sure you iron the shiny side down. They stick to the iron if you don’t get that part right. Don’t ask me how I know.
J working on his, very intent as you can see from his face:
NM can’t wait to peel off the stencil:
After it’s dry to the touch we peeled off the stencils (except for me, I pulled them off while they were still wet!). And here’s the result of their creative design and painting skills:
Hope you enjoyed it! Happy birthday, USA!
Barton Creek Greenbelt Hike
Posted on | June 30, 2010 | No Comments
Good thing we went yesterday instead of postponing it until today. It poured today and it looks like the plan is to pour for the rest of the week.
Let me share the fun with you…
How to read
Posted on | June 25, 2010 | 2 Comments
I wanted to share a portion of a book we have been going through at church. It was something of an eye-opener for me mainly because I never thought of taking notes while reading. Imagine that? I always took notes in class, but never thought to do that while learning from a book.
This is from “Spiritual Leadership – Principles of Excellence for Every Believer” by J. Oswald Sanders from the chapter entitled “The Leader and Reading”. Here goes:
Use the following proven strategies for making your reading worth-while and profitable:
- What you intend to quickly forget, spend little time reading. The habit of reading and forgetting only builds the habit of forgetting other important matters.
- Use the same discrimination in choosing books as in choosing friends.
- Read with pencil and notebook in hand. Unless your memory is unusually retentive, much gained from reading is lost in a day. Develop a system of note taking. It will greatly help the memory.
- Have a “commonplace book,” as they are called —a book oto record what is striking, interesting, and worthy of second thought. In that way, you will build a treasure trove of material for future use.
- Verify historical, scientific, and other data.
- Pass no word until its meaning is knows. Keep a dictionary at hand.
- Vary your reading to keep your mind out of a rut. Variety is as refreshing to the mind as it is to the body.
- Correlate your reading—history with poetry, biography with historical novel. For example, when reading the history of the American Civil War, take up also the biography of Lincoln or Grant and the poetry of Walt Whitman.
I tried
Posted on | June 19, 2010 | No Comments
Really, I did. I cajoled, I teased, I begged. In the end silly-ness won. Was that for the best?
The inevitable:
Ah, but the hand on the shoulder makes it for me!
Hornsby Bend Bird Observatory
Posted on | June 18, 2010 | No Comments
I know I have a backlog of posts to do, but today was fun so I have to start off with that.
Hornsby Bend Bird Observatory: whodathunk it? When I asked some moms if they’ve heard of bird observatory/water treatment plant in Austin they’d never heard of it. I’m not sure I remember where I heard of such a thing either. Thanks to Google, we found it and got directions to boot.
We brought our binoculars, a bag of Pirate’s Booty, bottles of water and our quiet voices. You’re supposed to whisper to keep the birds from flying off, they say. I think someone yelled before we got there, though. But that’s ok, it was fun anyhow and for several reasons.
1) The drive.
How can one not be tempted to take a dirt-ish road? Especially when one is in a truck. This is what the whole drive was like: literally one lane, narrow and at times bordered on either side by water. “Mom, don’t turn too much to the right!” was something heard often from J in the back when we were driving. It didn’t take long for them to realize that mom was driving something like 5 mph and it was fun to stand up and feel the bumps and dips as we went along. Actually, I could end the list with that. That was too much fun!
Wait, what, no hike? No hike. You’ll see later.
2) The scenery.
It’s not every day you get to drive through a water treatment facility. Well, unless you worked there, I suppose.
The water was pretty and bordered by lots of trees and pretty plants which is probably what attracts the birds in the first place.
This plant looks almost like that wild plant that grows in the Philippines that people would cook and eat:
3) The birds.
Well, we didn’t get to see the endangered black-capped vireo. We did manage to see a few of these guys which are new to us:
Grackles, but female ones only (not sure why):
They seem to be yelling at each other (yes, shot through a window, I’ll explain later):
A few sparrows (didn’t catch on camera) and lots and lots and lots of swallows!
The swallows (I think that’s what they are) were all over the place, swooping across the little lane we were driving/bouncing around on.
They made sure there were lots of homes for birds…
…and bats!
It didn’t take long for us to get to a structure that was built for bird observation. My youngest noted right away that it was seldom used owing to the fact that there were spider webs all over the place.
There was no way that I was going to stick my finger near this orb weaver so you could get a good sense of scale. While I know they’re not aggressive, believe me when I say this thing was huge and so apparently well fed.
There was no shortage of predatory insects at all.
This guy wanted to hitch a ride. I think he knew the yellow jackets and giant spiders were waiting to get him.
Incidentally, this was Joshua’s door and I didn’t flick it away for him (he used his brother’s door instead). I used to be a lot less afraid of bugs but the bug-fearing people in my life have rubbed off on me. I mean, I know these spiders rarely get people but when you see them having a family reuinion it’s hard not to shake the camera as you snap. It’s a symptom of the heebie jeebies.
So. Why no hike?
1.) Snakes. Alright, admittedly just one snake. But this was a water treatment facility and as soon as I see a snake skitter into the water across our little driving path, my first thought was “water moccasin” and “aggressive” and “no more hike for me today.”
2.) Bugs, bugs, bugs.
No, these weren’t biting bugs at all. The shot above was taken just a couple of minutes after we got back in the car when we realized we didn’t feel like sitting in the bird observation structure with the nasty bugs (and possibly snake but I didn’t want to draw the boys’ attention to the big hole in the ground). We rather liked sitting in the truck and bouncing at 5 mph.
But we opened the window at some point and a whole bunch of these bugs flew in. It quickly became obvious why the insect-loving swallows, grackles, bats and dragon flies were hanging out in major population numbers. This place was a massive buffet! They just had to fly around with their mouths open and they were guaranteed a full belly. As soon as our windows opened, those bugs saw their ticket to living a full life expectancy (probably a matter of just days, though).
The boys didn’t enjoy that part much at all. I did obligingly open the windows once more to “let the bugs out” only to let in their extended family. What’s on our truck interior fabric is no fancy pattern, those are bug guts.
That being said, we did have a good time. The boys got a tiny thrill when they realized that we would have to back up a long way if we ever met oncoming traffic. We even ran into a group of homeschoolers we knew while we were there. I’m sure we’ll head back there just for kicks since it’s really close to the airport and it’s free.
Oh, here’s stuff we wanted to see but certainly didn’t get to:
Maybe next time 
Spiderssss
Posted on | June 17, 2010 | 2 Comments
Ewwww.
Taken while on a walk at Circle C park (pics later). The boys are calling for me to hurry; they see a way to cross the creek and I better hurry. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice movement and see the inside of this tree hollow just moving.
Fredricksburg
Posted on | June 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
So two weekends ago we headed out to Fredricksburg to see if we could find some peaches to bring home. It would have been a waste of a few good hours to stay at home and sit in front of the computer, know what I mean?
Texas Hill Country is just awash with wildflowers right now.
You just have to deal with this when you wade through the wildflowers and grasses:
We stopped for a moment at this place and found it’s very dog-friendly.
The Wild West isn’t complete without a prairie schooner, is it?
They had several fields of wildflowers being cultivated. But if you cultivate them are they really still “wild”?
We drove into Fredricksburg, grabbed a lunch to go then headed back out. We found a spot where we could eat outside but Sprocket found something…
She has good reason to look worried. The picnic area was crawling with these guys:
They are HUGE. I wasn’t about to put my hand or toes near them so you could get a sense of scale. They were all over the place and had even worn a path in the dirt with their comings and goings. There was also this, which I got by judiciously avoiding the ants:
And I finally remembered to get a picture of these guys, drive-by-shooting style:
After lunch, we hunted for peaches in earnest. We were trying to find a certain peach stand. We couldn’t find the right one, but there was no shortage of peach stands this year. We even had the bonus of ice cream!
What I'm Doing...
- just came back from a family photo shoot! Way more fun with a fellow photographer along. 15 hrs ago
- @mskrisaa also consignment and resale stores probably are good places to check. no one consigns stuff that is flimsy (i think) in reply to mskrisaa 1 day ago
- @mskrisaa i should do that more. there are crazy amounts of good clothes, etc. at certain GWs in my area. in reply to mskrisaa 1 day ago
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