Our Feathered Friends

Along our journey, Dennis and I had the pleasure of seeing many birds. Some of our feathered friends have moved too quickly for a photo. Here are a few photos of the ones that paused long enough for a pose or didn't see us right away.

Red hawk watching River Reflections RV Park, CA

 San Diego was a great place to see a variety of birds large and small.

Resting seagull and pelican

Preening pelican post-flight

Sea gull in flight at La Jolla Cove

Bright blue under-beak of the Brandt's Cormorant

Silhouette of hummingbird with tongue out

Blue heron going for the little fish, San Diego Harbor

Hummingbirds always delight the eye.

Female rufous hummingbird at Paddy's feeder

Rufous hummingbird at Paddy's feeder in San Diego

Hummingbird with thick or damaged beak at Paddy's feeder

There were more hummingbirds at Joshua Tree National Park in California.

This Anna's Hummingbird has irridescent purple neck feathers

In flight feeding

Shimmering green feathers - Anna's hummingbird, I believe

Forgot the name of this bird!

Can't forget the roadrunner and quail!

At Monterey Wharf, this gull posed for a postcard shot!

In Redwood City south of San Francisco, the back end of the RV park backed up to Greco Island in the San Francisco Bay. Here we heard and saw egrets, herons, mallards, and geese round the clock.

White egret searching for food

Dinner time for this pair

Sunday stroll for the Canadian Geese

These are just some of the many birds we've seen this trip. As I find more images of our feathered friends, I will update this post or create a new one.

Driving around Texas Hill Country

It's good to have friends with friends in high places. 

A friend took us out for a bite to eat yesterday and then to see some of the 'country.' Nine hours and 170 miles later we'd done it Texas style. Here are some notes and pix of that.

Here we are; Opie's!!! Just west of Oak Hill in western Austin.
M brought this espresso with her to finish off while John & I remembered the Air Force. 

First thing inside the door at Opie's you pick your meat.
M and I split a half rack. It was seven of the meatiest ribs we've ever seen. 

The dining room. No plates. You eat on sheets of butcher paper.
Pick your sides & deserts here. Small (tiny), Medium (more than needed) or Large (OMG).
In the back are great Butter Beans or Pinto Beans and bread. Included. 

Pink granite outcropping in the Llano River. Lots of pink granite quarried here.
Also crossed the Pedernales River and Barton Creek. (No pix)
Whole area has stone just below the top soil. Any rain runs off
and quickly gathers in the arroyos to flood.

You can barely see it, but this is a "new" castle
modeled after the original plans for Castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria.
It was built by an Austin real estate developer
and his wife and is called Faulkenstein Castle.

We've seen these since we entered the area.
John says they are Ball Moss.  Despite its common name it's not a moss, but a true plant with seeds and flowers. iI's an epiphyte, an air-feeder. A member of the Bromeliad family,
with Spanish Moss and Pineapple(!?!?) it is not parasitic and will not hurt the tree.

We drove around and saw some more this's and that's, but the end of the afternoon was visiting LBJ's ranch outside Johnson City, Texas, just making it for the final 4PM tour. It was named Johnson City before Lyndon Baines Johnson was born. His Dad was a state senator for several terms. His Mom believed in education. Nothing that unusual about that. When he was still a preschooler he would go to the one-room schoolhouse near the family home where he was born. He'd sit on the teacher's lap when she read. When it was time for him to attend school for real they moved into town. Still a modest home. 

This is the one room schoolhouse a few hundred yards from where LBJ was born.
There is a photo of him with a table set up outside, in front of the third window back,
ready to sign one of many education laws he wrangled through Congress.
The outside seems to be block, but it is tin panels stamped to simulate block. 

Girls on one side. Boys on the other. 

This is a longer shot of the front of the "Texas White House."
He spent 490 days of his 5 years as President here. 

There's a Live Oak in the front yard estimated to be nearly 450 years old.
President Johnson would have visitors - whether foreign leaders or the Cabinet -
take folding chairs outside and meet under this great tree.

When guests would arrive the President had them sign their names in wet concrete pavers.
This was their "Guest Book"
I suspect he enjoyed making them a little awkward in their suits and expensive shoes.

Here's a shot of a big portrait of LBJ and LBJ.
He was a master strategist and effective politician who
came to the Presidency at a very tough time
and did, what he believed, were the right things.
Good people.

The little section that juts out on the left was the original house built
in 1894 by "Polecat" Meier of limestone fieldstone.
LBJ's Aunt and Uncle, from whom LBJ bought it in '51, had added on
and then the President and Lady Bird added on more.

Here is a view of the back of a model of the final home.
The President added a modest office with room for two secretaries.
Mrs. Johnson added a large bedroom so she could sleep while he
talked on the phone and met with people to all hours.
It was 8,000 square feet in total, but no room we saw was large enough
to impart a sense of that size.

Here's a shot of the model from the front.
Sorry I don't have any photos of the interior. No pix allowed inside.
It was all very 1960s to 1980s decor.  LBJ was 6-4 without his boots on. There were several doors in the old house he would not have cleared without serious ducking. 

Driving around the hill country we passed a lot of torn up ground, evidence of feral hogs, also pronghorns and some real, honest-to-Texas longhorns. (They grew Herefords on LBJ Ranch. They put devices on their horns when they are young to get the horns to curve in.)  We passed this good looking piece of art (below) that sits on the highway to attract you to a nearby development; The Preserve at Walnut Springs where they "invite retirees, second homeowners, and families to relocate to the relaxing, private ranch lifestyle with horseback riding, swimming, and tennis." Like you do.

After seeing the Texas White House and other parts of the LBJ memorial (LBJ and Lady Bird are buried there too) we went back to Johnson City and, though we all suspected it impossible, we ate again. This time at the Hill Country Cupboard. M and I reverted to our typical style and ordered veggie stuff. I made a great meal of sides: green beans (OK, with bacon), black-eyed peas, seasoned rice and half of Maureen's fried green tomatoes. Friend John shared bites of his massive Chicken Fried Steak, the house specialty, with us. It was excellent!
M and I brought home a portion each of peach cobbler and cherry pie. John, still recovering from our lunch at Opie's, had to take home half of that plate-sized chicken fried steak. Scrumptious as it was.

Carlsbad Caverns

The campground at Brantley Lake

Late on a Friday morning, we left Brantley Lake RV park in just the Smart car. Waze took us south, on NM-285, then along the truck route to avoid the traffic in the town of Carlsbad, and beyond to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. It was maybe a half-hour drive. We arrived at noon. The remaining Ranger-guided tour was filled so we rented little electric docents and took off to do the self-guided tour ourselves. We arrived at the entrance at the same time as a cluster of families with rambunctious kids and a snowy-headed grandma. I thought they’d move slowly, and tried to get ahead, but, since we stop every few feet to admire and photograph, they were right with us. We held back and they giggled, ran and questioned their way ahead into the darkness. Soon it was blissfully cave silent with only the occasional drip of water patiently building another point of interest for whatever visits in another million years.

The Natural Entrance as you approach

The Natural Entrance from the inside. (Note the  visitors on the ramp.)

Early in the 1900s a cowboy named Jim White started exploring the cave we now visit. In the 1930s(?) they blasted a yawning opening which is used today under the questionable title of ‘“the natural entrance.” The path starts with tight little switchbacks that quickly take you deeper and darker into the cave. It seems really dark at first as you walk the black asphalt path and your eyes struggle to adjust after the mid-day New Mexico sun. At the deepest part they say you’re 740 feet down from the surface. An alternate is to take the elevator from the visitor center to the centrally located snack bar/gift shop and loop out from there in either of two directions. After walking all the trails and each taking maybe a hundred inadequate photos we took the elevator up to exit. Other, heartier souls trekked both in and out via the switchback ramps. 

Part of the Gift Shop / Snack Bar 740 ft. down

While it's easy for us to visit, it's taken some heroics to explore the cave. One group took four nights with a helium balloon attempting to hook a rope around stalactites more than 200 feet overhead so they could then climb up said rope to explore passageways they thought they could see in a cavity that rose another fifty-plus feet into the ceiling above. After all that effort and courage they found those passages only went twenty or so feet.

It would seem, in a cave, you'd spend a lot of time looking down. But a lot of the action is overhead.

In the summer 400,000 free-tailed bats rush out of the cave each sunset. We were there in late January so no bats for us. The cave's attractiveness to bats over centuries led to decades of guano mining. (There's a cheery trade!) The guano was used for fertilizer and gunpowder; it's mostly saltpeter. Mining their local guano kept the South in the Civil War long after blockades had prevented foreign imports.

Carlsbad Caverns has some two and a half miles of asphalt trails with stainless steel pipe railings on any side that’s not protected with a cave wall. They ask you to never touch the walls or formations, and we were careful to avoid them. The path is easy; wide and flat side to side, To cover the route and reach the rooms does require a fair amount of up and down, but nothing treacherous. 

The path is along the left, defined by the stainless pipe rail.

The size of Carlsbad Caverns is hard to depict or describe.

Most of these pix are long, full frame iPhone shots.

For scale, Maureen is standing next to the bottom half of the red at the bottom of this pix.

The part of Carlsbad Caverns we casual tourists get to see is a wonder. The decorations or speleothems in this massive cave are indescribably complex and varied. The color palette is not great, mostly a very pale tan with some streaks of caramel or accented with black manganese markings. But, the shapes astound. One rocket-sized column seems to have captured in glistening stone the pulsing climb of the father of all jellyfish. 

Stone curtains hang from the ceiling as if waving in a gentle breeze. Needle-like darts hang by the thousands overhead, sometimes clustering and combining into great inverted spires, all vaguely threatening unless you trust in the momentary protection of the the scale of geologic time. 

The Park's lighting of these fantastic sculptings is both gentle and dramatic. The range was well beyond our iPhone cameras, always leaving something black or another area burned out, but the eye, the human eye, is capable of so much more. The cave is a delight for the eye. 

Below the cave accessed by this easy walk is another level, another cave, the lower level. There are also many chambers and tunnels that extend in other directions. Under this hilly section of the Chihuahuan Desert are said to be 300 caves all formed some 250 million years ago. 

They're still exploring another cave, Lechuguilla, that intersects Carlsbad. Spelunkers felt wind blowing up through rubble on the floor ninety feet below another entrance. Cavers say, "Where it blows, it goes." A group of Colorado cavers obtained permission from the Park service and dug through the rubble. They broke through into new passageways May of 1986. Since then explorers have mapped 136+ miles of passages and have pushed the depth of the cave to 1,604 feet, ranking Lechugilla as the fifth longest cave in the world (third longest in the US) and deepest limestone cave in the country. To me the thought of traveling over many miles in natural caves - climbing, rappelling, crawling, skootching along, carrying in all the food and gear you need in complete, perpetual darkness and then finding your way back out, leaving nothing behind, is just astounding.