Random = Better (Part 2)

A little bit further up the interstate, and we took the exit for Cascade Caverns road. Turned onto a tiny side street with the right name, but after a few minutes of following it, I started to wonder if we were going the right way. This didn't look like the route to a major tourist attraction -- it was a two-lane road (one each way), kinda under-traveled, passing the occasional ranch home, and no signs about the caverns. About the time I made this observation, Brandy finally saw a simple wooden sign on the side of the road telling us that it was straight ahead.

Eventually, we were pulling into the Cascade Caverns RV park...seemed a little strange, but as we got closer to the end of the road, we finally saw signs about cave tours. We parked, and read the historical marker about the place (Ooh!, Seven waterfalls!), and went into the office for tickets.

My only experience with cave tours up till now had been very commercialized places with big compounds, or well-maintained state park facilities. This place was definitely something else. The office looked like something from a barely-hanging-on small town, a couple pool tables, some antiques or junk piled up in a corner, a snowy television with rabbit ears, and dust everywhere. You even had to leave the building and go to another one to use the bathroom. Between that, the prickly pear forest (I didn't know they grew trunks), and the big green dinosaur, I had a feeling this would be something unique.

Our tour guide looked in his early 20's, said he knew everything about the cave, except the diameter, and informed us that we were in the lowest point in the county, which explained the "Flood Line" painted on the buildings. There were several brown wood abandoned buildings, and apparently they just kept building in a new spot after the previous ones got flooded and the walls warped. My guess for the age of the buildings would have been from the 50s or 60s, but they were actually from the 80s, just severely aged from the weather.

We began hiking down a simple sidewalk, and after a bit, he pointed out the house that belonged to the man who discovered the cave. Seems he wondered why his home was always a constant temperature, found a hole beneath his floorboards, went down to explore and ended up in his backyard. Being the enterprising type, he apparently decided to start selling tickets. He excavated the cave, put in some basic lighting ( you can even see the electrical cable hanging down through a convenient hole to power everything), built the stairs (which didn't have the best handrails, but oh well). I'm guessing the cave used to enjoy much greater popularity before being overshadowed by Natural Bridge Caverns and others to the north.

Eventually, after going down what we were told was 100 steps, we finally entered the cave -- ah, 65 degrees feels great after being in 100+ degrees outside, although Brandy kept pointing out that it didn't feel like it. This cave was dark, drippy, and apparently got so much water that it needed constant pumping to keep it drained. We saw a mastodon tooth, and some fascinating calcium formations before being led through the short chamber that every cave tour has. This one was sadly beyond Angela's capabilities, so she waited near the entrance, while I squatted and waddled on through....even Brandy had to stoop, and she's only 5-foot!

There was the standard pointing out of different formations and what they got named, thanks to imaginative people -- the guard, the sea turtle, the profile of Lincoln....or was it Washington? Probably the most amusing story was about a simple stalactite on the way out -- our guide had been born with flawed corneas, and he got an experimental surgery done to him when he was an infant that saved his sight...as an unfortunate side-effect, though, he is extraordinarily sensitive to light; he has to wear sunglasses when outdoors. Well, his co-workers didn't believe that he could see in the dark as well as he claimed, so they made him a bet -- they'd shut off all the lights in the cave, and he had to make it all the way to the end (and presumably retrieve something) and back in 30 minutes. Well, he can see....except when there's no light leaks at all, and there are some areas of the cave where no light penetrates from the surface, and during one of these, a spider brushed his arm, and he freaked, running headfirst into the stalactite he was pointing out. A little bloodied and bruised, he nevertheless won the bet.

Eventually, we entered the main chamber, and it was just incredible. Light-colored limestone, a huge pool of water, and above it all, a 100-foot waterfall cascading down to feed the pool. The walkway went in a big U, but remained a distance away from the falls. I tried a dozen times to take a decent picture of the waterfall, but all I could get was a blur. Someday, we'll have to go again, and next time, I will remember the tripod.

All too soon, the time came for the return trip. When we got back past the short chamber, Angela was nowhere to be found. I guessed she had decided to get a head start on the steps, and I was right...it took a while, but we made it back up the 100 steeps...I mean steps. Rest in the car's air conditioning for a few minutes while I plotted out the next leg of our journey, then a stop for road drinks, and we were off again.

We drove briefly through downtown Bourne, then cut north to cruise through the hill country back roads, on our way to Luckenbach. We stopped for a little while to poke around the Post Office/General Store in Kendalia, and were much amused by all the ads on the town bulletin board (people looking for ranch work, someone looking for a roommate, etc), before we continued on through Sisterdale (Fireman's Fish Fry, woo!), and finally up to Luckenbach.

Angela got her picture taken with Shotgun the bull (the owner couldn't talk her into sitting on him, though), while Brandy and I hung out for a little while chatting with some other folks who were wandering the state that day. We spent about an hour and a half just relaxing, browsing the store (yay, we now have t-shirts!), listening to some music, and just being social. Daylight was starting to fade, though, and dinner was planned to be back in San Antonio, so I plotted us an interesting route back, and we were off again.

We had just been on the road for about 10 minutes, when Brandy saw a spot where another road split off and went down a steep little hill to the banks of a river that ran parallel to the highway. Spontaneity grabbed us and we had to turn down and check it out. We found a small one-lane bridge crossing a mostly-dry portion of the Blanco River. I couldn't resist dipping my feet in the water, and we took a while just sort of wandering around the empty road, poking around the riverbank, and feeling like kids just hanging out in a newly-discovered grotto, not really doing anything, just existing and taking it in. I had just finished experimenting with the panoramic shooting function on my camera when Brandy came up and showed me a tiny frog she had caught. I grinned, and got a big kick when she mused, "well, it's not fishing if I don't have a line and don't actually attempt to catch the fish, right?" She pointed out a bass of some breed in a pool just off the bridge, and chunked the frog in its general vicinity. That poor frog...I think it was in the water for about a quarter of a second before it was dinner. Definitely an impressive and amusing thing to see before getting back in the car.

Thanks to our recently acquired Roads of Texas, I plotted a revised course taking advantage of the really back roads -- the CO-roads (County Roads, as Angela keeps correcting us). Thanks to that book, we saw some incredible vistas, and a beautiful house built with the porch and balcony to appreciate the view. We saw a one-lane bridge sign, but no bridge and the road remained two lanes, and we saw a lane ends sign where there was no extra lane....I think the bridge needs to give the lane back to that other road before someone gets confused. We crossed over I don't know how many cattle guards, and sadly, as we crossed the Guadalupe River, it had already gotten dark.

"Tomorrow," we agreed, as we took the straightest path back to San Antonio, where we gorged on seafood at Sea Island. Oooh, good stuff! Chipotle-encrusted flounder, grilled Gulf shrimp, absolutely delicious key-lime pie.....yeah...go there.

We were worn out by the time we got back to my dad's place....pretty much just went in, and passed out. Tomorrow would be the journey home, and I planned to make it a much more memorable one than the simple trip down I-35 that we took Friday night to get down there...