Even though it’s the middle of November our temperature for the day was right about 79 ~ 80 degrees, which was just about perfect. This is completely the opposite of my Bozeman where I used to spend most of my time.
The tour was conducted by Texas Wine Tours, and if you are ever out that way and want to do a tour I’d give them a shout. Especially if you can get Bill to drive you around. He was our driver and he was extremely knowledgeable about wines, history, foliage, and many other things.
We hit five wineries that day and my only real complaint is that the second winery sucked. All of the rest of the wineries and the company of the other guests was fairly well received even if we didn’t care for the particular wines. Texas wines tend to run a bit on the sweet side, but that’s how they seem to like everything down here. The sweeter the better. We tried a particular Riesling that was so sweet my g/f thought about asking where the waffles and pancakes were.
The next day on the way home we stopped off at Longhorn Caverns and took the tour of the cave. This was a pretty easy tour. You didn’t have to have any safety gear, elbow pads, flashlights, etc., and you were squeezing through passages the size of a tube of toothpaste. Are there many successful cavers that are fat bastards?
Don’t get me wrong, there were some parts of the cave that were a little narrow and even for someone as short as me I had to duck quite a bit and stay down to get from one cavern to another. But hey, if the 80-year-old lady in the group could do it, I wasn’t about to let her show me up.
Not to give you a big history lesson, but apparently the cave was used by Comanche Indians, philanthropists, outlaws, and even armies of the civil war. In other words, it’s been fairly well reamed out by just about everyone.
While going through the cave they point out that the lights have to be turned on and then back off as you move between sections. This is because the lights have caused a particular algae to start growing in the cave that otherwise wouldn’t be there. At first I thought the lighting was done fairly well, then I realized that the CCC had really screwed up parts of the cave putting the lighting in and trying to hide the wiring. I’d rather have them not try to hide the stuff and damage the cave a little less. I can figure out that the light needs a wire and that the wire and light fixture were not part of Mother Nature’s plan.
As we walked through the cave we saw about four bats. Three of them were sleeping and one of them was obviously pissed that we were in there and flew around and through us before finding some other place to chill. These were Eastern Pipistrelle bats and are pretty much the size of fuzzy golf balls.
I was happy that I got to see some bats. The tour guide said that there were maybe thirty of these little bastards throughout the cave and that no other bats inhabited the cave.
But we decided that I really wouldn’t make a good tour guide. Why? Well, at one point the tour guide was telling a lady that the CCC was formed during the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal. The lady was blank, so the guide starts giving her a history lesson on how the govt. created all these jobs for people, and part of that was the CCC. I think the lady was clues and she started asking more questions at which point I rolled my eyes and exclaimed to my g/f that apparently some people just don’t remember their history.
As we were walking through the cave they pointed out a rock formation that was supposed to resemble a profile of Pres. Lincoln, who had stayed in the cave one night. Naturally I said it looked like his teeth needed some work, and that provoked a chuckle or two.
But towards the end of the tour we were in a room and the tour guide was pointing out where the last flood line was on the wall – about 20 or 30 feet up, and there was a lot of silt and stuff all over the wall from the flood and the river (the cave was carved by flooding and a river running through it).
Immediately after the guide telling us this a lady pipes up and asks “Is that bat guano?” I casually leaned into the ear of my g/f and said “Lady, there is only 30 bats in the whole cave….do you have any idea how much those little bastards would have to shit to leave that much guano?” and of course she starts dying laughing. My g/f said the bats had to eat a LOT of fiber….
I also had the bright idea of flipping the lights out right when people are trying to get through low ceilings or tight spaces. For some reason I would find this highly amusing.
So we decided that I wouldn’t make a good tour guide. Berating the customers, calling them idiots, turning out the lights on them, etc., just wouldn’t be very conducive for business.
