Sunday we were up and gone by 9:30 to head west away from the nasty weather that was on it’s way to Louisiana. Our destination was Ratcliff Recreation Area in the Davey Crockett National Forest, just 140 miles away. That would leave 225 miles for Monday to get to Inks Lake State Park, west of Austin Texas. By 10:30 we were crossing the Toledo Bend Reservoir bridge. This is a huge body of water.
At the other end, we entered Texas!
And Texas welcomed us. 😉
This was Sunday morning, and from what we gathered while traveling this morning, if you ain’t in church, you’re fishin!! We saw SOOOO many fishing boats being towed here and there, and every boat launch was over capacity for parking. These Southern boys take their weekend fishin serious!!
We made it to our campground before 1:00, and went about finding a spot since we didn’t have a reservation. I had made notes last night about which spots were available for ‘first-come-first-serve” and the length of the sites. I like sites that are over 50’ long if we can get them. While driving through, the campground host was out on his little bug-around-buggy, and asked if he could help. I told him we were looking to see where we could fit, and I thought site 30 might be good because it’s 60’ long. He said it was reserved, and I asked “for tonight? – we just want to stay one night..” “Oh – no, that would be fine because it’s reserved starting tomorrow.” Perfect. This campground was a bit interesting to maneuver around with this big rig because there were sooo many trees! Thankfully, site #30 was a back-in almost straight in from a curve in the road. My professional driver stuck our baby in there in one fell swoop! Whew!
So here we are for the night. Not a bad deal for $10! (That’s half price with our Lifetime Senior American the Beautiful pass.). We had 30amp power which was sufficient since we didn’t need heat or air conditioning. The weather was long pants and sleeves kind of temperature. There wasn’t water at the site, but we were fine with what was in our tank. The cell service was really, really bad here, so no work on the blog got done. But there was a bit of antenna TV reception, so we could watch a bit of entertainment in the evening. It’s interesting how our daylight hours change as we move west within the Central Time zone. Tomorrow we’ll head farther west.
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Monday we left our spot at Ratcliff, and drove primarily state highways for most of our 225 miles. Our destination was Inks Lake State Park, just west of Austin Texas. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this park, other than its proximity to other things to do. This area of Texas is known as the hill country, and there are numerous wineries here, as well as caves and caverns. Plus, we have reservations at an offroad adventure park for Thursday & Friday that is non-refundable. We can start riding as soon as we get there after 9:00 Thursday morning, so I wanted to spend Wednesday night someplace really close so we can get there in the morning on Thursday and play all day. Another thing I wanted to do was tour a cave or cavern, and there are several in the area.
This was a neat old barn in between two beautiful large homes along our drive.
We drove into some hilly country and it was really green and beautiful. Not generally what we picture Texas looking like.
One of our three-year-old grandsons loves cows. But his definition of cows are black and white. If they are any other color, they are bovine. So I had to send this picture and ask my cow-ologist if a white face counts. Apparently yes, these might be cows. However, we are pretty much in bovine-beef country, and we did not see many cows, which make milk. How do you argue with a pre-schooler? 🤷♀️
One of the features of driving the state highways is that you have to slow down when you go through small towns. And stop for trains. Yet this Beverage Barn was smart! It is a drive-through, and we had a truck get out of our train-waiting traffic line and drive through the beverage station, then got back in his spot in line. It’s Texas, y’all!
More beautiful flowers!
We made it to Inks Lake State Park later than we planned. It took us five hours to drive the 225 miles. Oh well – it was pretty, and not stressful. We’re all settled into our spot here. It is a HUGE campground, with over 300 sites!! We have water and 50 amp power here.
I took a little walk-about while my driver relaxed. I thought this was pretty.
There is a trail that goes around the end of the lake, so I meandered that way and found lots of young adults out kayaking, swimming, playing on shore and on the rocks.
Oooh – more beautiful flowers with cactus. I keep smelling a sort of orange blossom smell, and we’re thinking it might be these flowers. I haven’t put my nose into one yet to check.
I just missed getting a picture of one of the guys jumping off of that big rock over there.
We relaxed the rest of the evening. It’s nice that we have really good cellular service here, but not much for TV entertainment in the evening. It was quite breezy in the evening, so we did not sit outside.
Tuesday we went to see a cavern. I looked at them all on line last night. Some of them are like 90 miles away. The Longhorn Cavern State Park is only about 7 miles from here so, the tour is 1.5 hours, so I made reservations for a noon tour.
There are some neat old buildings at the Longhorn Caverns state park, but no camping. It is a day-use park only.
This building and most of the park was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This was a program that President Franklin D. Roosevelt put into place after the Great Depression to get people to work. About 25% of the country was unemployed, so young single men between the ages of 18-25 were given the opportunity for jobs. “The CCC planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than 800 parks nationwide during its nine years of existence. CCC employees fought forest fires, planted trees, cleared and maintained access roads, re-seeded grazing lands and implemented soil-erosion controls. Additionally, they built wildlife refuges, fish-rearing facilities, water storage basins and animal shelters. To encourage citizens to get out and enjoy America’s natural resources, FDR authorized the CCC to build bridges and campground facilities.”
This is the inside of the same building. The CCC built this with materials that were removed from the cavern. I thought it was really neat with all the different textures and materials.
The CCC provided on-the-job training and many men learned specialized skills, so there were very long-lasting benefits to the men, their families, and our country. Here at Longhorn Cavern, they excavated and removed over 2.5 tons of debris and built stairs and walkways throughout the cavern to make the accessible.
There were many sink-holes like this. Most have been closed up to try to keep the cavern dry. This is one of two caverns in the United States that was created by an underground river. The other one is Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.
Of course, electric lights have been added to the cavern to make it enjoyable. It was huge, and the variety of stone materials was very interesting. My geologist friends would have really liked it. Our tour guide said we walked 1.5 miles, so we must have gone in 3/4 mile!
There was a lot of crystalline kinds of stone, but it isn’t worth anything because its very soft. However, I did sort of feel like one of the Seven Dwarves as we walked through all these gems! The cavern is also home to the second smallest variety of bats in the world. There is one right dead center of this picture…. a little brown thing that looks like a bug. It is a fully grown tricolor bat, and smaller than an apricot. We saw quite a few, and they didn’t seem disturbed by us. They are loners, not a communing kind of bat.
This was cool. It was a piece of dolomite stone that the excavators found, and they placed it here as a “watchdog”. Scientists have examined it and there are no tool carving marks, so they say it was naturally carved by the river. (It did break around the middle once, so had to be repaired.)
It’s hard to see in two-dimensions, but this was a skinny crawl through … that we didn’t have to go through.
But there were a few places where we had to walk bent over for a ways.
It was really a pretty cavern with a lot of this smooth dolomite and limestone that was smoothly shaped by the running river and the eddies in the moving water. There were also places with a layer of a particular stone that the Natives used to make arrowheads, and a nice big 3” one was found just recently inside the cave.
Ha! Proof that the Dwarves Happy and Grumpy were here. 😉. He wasn’t actually Grumpy – he liked it.
This is just a crazy picture of the limestone layers carved by flowing water.
There was a place where our tour guide stopped us and had us stay close to our own family members, and he turned off all the lights and his flashlight. It was pitch black. Try as we might, there was no adjusting the eyes to pitch black. We couldn’t see anything, no matter how hard our brains tried. It would be really scary to be stuck down there with no lights! The Native Americans used the caverns, but they only went in places where there was natural light from a sink hole or some sort of light hole. They believed evil spirits hung out in the pitch blackness and wouldn’t go in where there wasn’t natural light.
Speaking of light – this was a very cool demonstration. All the lights were turned off, and just our guide’s flashlight was on. He put it up flat against a crystalline rock, and the light refracted out and lit up the whole room. It was really cool.
We really enjoyed the cave, and our tour was nearly two hours. Our guide was Jim, a private contractor, and he was very entertaining. It was cool and windy outside, but inside the cave was warmer, and the deeper we went, the more humid it got. The fresh air when we came back outside was really nice.
Another structure at the park that was built by the CCC was a lookout tower. We went up the spiral staircase to see the view, which I didn’t take any pictures of. But the staircase was cool.
When we were done at the park, I owed Kenny a beer, right? So we went into Marble Falls. On the way, there were some Texas Longhorn cattle. I sent the picture to little Cooper, but I didn’t hear back if they qualified as cows. I’m pretty sure these are beef on the hoof.
In town, our first stop was the Downtown Beer Hall. It was pretty big and had at least a couple dozen beers on tap, plus a cooler full of a variety of cans. The bartender was really nice and gave us samples of about six beers. None of them were perfect, so I checked out the cooler.
I found this pineapple marshmallow smoothie sour beer. Sounds weird, but hey – it has mallow in it! The bartender had never tried it, so I gave her a sample. It was delicious! The can has art and lettering that is a little Disney-esque, and it did taste a bit like a Dole pineapple whip. Yum! 🍍
We had just the one beverage here, and they didn’t have any food, so I spied two more breweries within two blocks. So we meandered to one of them for lunch. Along the way, more of these blue lupine flowers were everywhere. We heard someone say that the bloom this year is outstanding. They are Texas Bluebonnets, the state flower.
Next stop was the Bear King for lunch and maybe some good beer.
Yep – they had a porter, a barrel-aged porter, a barrel-aged barleywine, and a milk stout. OK… just give me a flight!
After lunch, there was another brewery on our way back to the truck, so we wandered in. They had a porter and a stout. We ordered one of each, but they actually weren’t anything special.
By now it was after 6:00 and we’d had enough beer, so we headed back to camp. It was a fun adventurous day! I’m not sure what we’ll do tomorrow. The weather should be dry and in the upper sixties. I checked out all the wineries, but many of them are not open on Wednesdays. Most of them charge $20-35 per person for wine tasting. Hmmmm…. it might be ok if we could find a really cool one with a nice view. I’m not a huge fan of wine, so a Tuscan theme winery with a view would be worth it. But I didn’t find anything good. I think we’ll just hang out in the campground and maybe do a hike on some of the trails here.
Wednesday was just a sleep-in and relax day. We didn’t leave the park, but we did go for a little hike. It wasn’t anything special, but it was a nice day for a walk. There is an assortment of pancake cactus and flowers here.
This tree/bush is just outside our door, and I haven’t figured out if it is this or the bluebonnets that smell sweet, kind of like orange blossoms. The bees like this bush, for sure.
Bluebonnets are everywhere! No wonder it is the state flower.
After we got home, I worked on this blog for your reading pleasure, and I enjoyed one of my favorite Left Hand Peanut Butter Stout beers. Plus, I jacked it up just a tiny bit with a little Screwball peanut butter whiskey. Because… why not?
It was a nice day, with temperatures in the upper 60’s. The wind got gusty sometimes which made me cold, so I was in and out of the camper a lot today. I checked out the restroom/shower buildings nearby, but found no evidence of a washer/dryer anywhere. I guess we’ll wait to do laundry in Arizona. I don’t think we’re out of undies quite yet. 😏
Tomorrow we get to take Kawi out and go play!!!!