Hill Country ramble, Part 2: Natural Bridge Caverns

As I noted in Part 1 of this travelogue mini-series, I sometimes evaluate well-known recreational venues, but my approach is meta-analytical rather than descriptive.  If instead you want a more mechanical assessment of Natural Bridge Caverns, that's available through their own website or write-ups such as this one. 

Let me frame my recent experience in Natural Bridge Caverns using an analogy. 

Do you ever wonder why birders do what they do?  Sure, most people would agree that birds are cool and interesting to see (especially from the convenience of one's own home office)... 

A mourning dove squab, newly liberated from the nest and still perplexed about his surroundings, recently overnighted on the rim of our bird bath.  Not the most conservative survival strategy, but he was a newbie who didn't know any better. 

So yes, birds are cool, but birders elevate the observational process to a whole 'nuther level.

For some, birding becomes a primary lifestyle driver, a fact that is not lost on the retailers and municipalities that pursue a share of their collective disposable income. 

Advertisement screengrabbed from Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine.  What this has to do with Natural Bridge Caverns will become apparent in a minute. 

If you read up on the psychology of birders, you'll find the usual attributions:  They develop it as an elaborate recreational hobby.  They do it for sport.  They choose birding as a means of identifying and socializing with like-minded people. 

But there's another less-oft cited reason:  They do it as a mild form of healthy dissociation.  

  Healthy dissociation is so poorly understood by laypeople that I couldn't even find a satisfying URL to describe it, so I had to screengrab from this Google book source. 

Some folks might instead declare this component to be selective attention, which is a more benign-sounding idea.  But I can't tell you how many times I've marveled at a birder who was able to deftly dissociate from his or her physical surroundings, which objectively should have been quite distressing at the time, so that they could instead focus solely on the species in front of them.   They didn't register the ankle-deep car-thrown trash including animal carcasses, urine bags, and discarded hypodermic needles on the shoulder of the road as they were stalking their feathery quarry.  They saw only the beauty before them.  The birds were their psychic relief valve, of sorts. 

The "bridge" at Natural Bridge Caverns may be natural, but being almost two hundred feet underground in a confined space with a hundred other people is not a natural experience and, if not approached from an optimal headspace, can be extremely stressful.

The mantra is always "get there early", but due to family schedules, we were forced to get there mid-afternoon on the Saturday of the last full summer weekend before school started.  We could scarcely have picked a worse time.  To say the place was mobbed would be the understatement of the century.  It looked like a Katrina evacuation center - people were exhausted and stressed to the max. 

From a state-of-mind perspective, I leverage photography the way birders leverage birds.

The more intimate tours were already sold out and so we had to see it via the "Discovery Tour", which is basically a controlled open-access cattle-call.  Notice how the webpage describes it as "Departs every 40 minutes, or sooner throughout the day".  When we got there, they were mobilizing huge crowds of people in a continuous flow.  I guess there's no need for fire regulations and associated capacity limitations underground, given that the relative humidity is 100% and there are few combustibles present. 

But you'd never realize that there was a simultaneous, distressing crush of people from looking at these photos. 

Ceiling shot.  No people up there, thankfully. 

Cave features are often given names so that visitors can mentally integrate them into existing conceptual frameworks.  My teenager said, "That doesn't look like a tower - it looks like a swarm of jellyfish."

Healthy dissociation is an adaptive life skill which usually develops with the wisdom of age.  Younger people often have greater difficulty detaching from the impositional aspects of a situation such that they can maximize their productive outcomes.  "Run between the raindrops," I sometimes tell my teenager when she becomes frustrated with school or stymied by the teenaged social climate.  In an active cave, the strategy of running between the raindrops becomes literally the case. 

Raindrops were falling on my head as I zoomed in for this eerie close-up of a particularly wet and active formation. 

Moral of the story:  In any stressful situation, find your own mechanism of healthy dissociation.  It may be birds, photography, interaction with your loved ones, approaching the challenges from a spiritual perspective, or some other focus. 

And oh - Natural Bridge Caverns really are worth seeing under any conditions of stress.  I wasn't sure they would be, because I'm a cave snob.  I've hiked miles and miles of Mammoth.  I spent a few years in the Show-Me State during graduate school, and it's hard for me to imagine anything topping a few of its offerings, especially Onondaga.  But I thoroughly enjoyed Natural Bridge, despite having seen it on what must have been the craziest day of the year. 

Focus on nothing but the up-side. 

Hill Country ramble, Part 1: Comal River tubing

For those of you who are not regular readers of this blog, from time to time I post about well-known regional venues and attractions, but I try to do it from the perspective of a village elder rather than a mainstream consumer.  I have no urge to participate in any follow-the-herd experience.  I'm not looking for mindless entertainment.  I have no compunction to deal with throngs of people, screaming children, drunkards, velvet ropes, and long lines at the entrance to whatever it is that everyone else is trying desperately to access.

But life is what happens when we're hoping for high-quality experiences, and so the trick is to compromise to the point where you can get something out of those well-known venues while still responding to the needs of your wider situation.  It can be done, but it takes a bit of discipline and forethought.

Such was the case this weekend when my teenager and I joined three other Clear Lake families for a tubing trip down the insanely-popular Comal River in New Braunfels. 

Here's one of the reference maps for this venue, with the Comal being that little stub below the dashed red line.  Do you notice how the very first directive on this map is to "drink responsibly"?  Not "welcome" or "have fun" or "enjoy yourself" or "be safe".  A quarter century I've lived in Texas, but I'd never before gone river tubing, because every tubing story I'd ever heard revolved around the extent of alcohol-based partying associated with it (although there are currently efforts to rein this practice in).  That's the last social climate to which I'd ever expose a young teenager. 

Map screengrabbed from this site. 

The obvious reasonable public access challenge is made even more dire by the current condition of the waterways shown on the map above. 

The worst drought conditions to date may have occurred in 2011, but it's not nearly over yet. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Most of the mighty Guadalupe is reportedly not tube-able because the water levels are now too low to support it.  That leaves only the Comal, the shortest river in the United States, to receive the central Texas water recreational crowd almost in its entirety, a predicament that sometimes proves to be harrowing.

What's visible in that photo above doesn't qualify as outdoor recreation - that's nothing less than a scene from a horror movie.  With or without public drunkenness, this is increasingly what you find on the Comal when you try to go with the flow, literally and figuratively. 

I screengrabbed that section of this KGNB radio website because the volume of spam in the comments section suggests that the site is not being properly moderated or curated, which means that it is more likely to disappear from the internet, and I think it's worth saving that very telling snippet for posterity. 

When I stumbled upon that web report above, what immediately came to mind was a quote from Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods: 

"As long as cities continue to overdevelop housing tracts and underdevelop parks and other sites for natural play, our regional parks and beaches will be crushed by demand, necessitating ever more stringent enforcement"
(p. 239 in the 2008 paperback edition).

In the example shown above, the phrase "crushed by demand" was quite literally the case. According to that article, eighteen people were injured to the point of requiring EMS services that day.

Anyway, that's the worst-case Comal River scenario, so the question then becomes how to achieve a best-case experience, especially when traveling with friends or family such that the logistics are impacted by the diverse needs of multiple people.  Here is how we handled our Comal float to the point of actually having a pretty good time:

1. We researched the vendors in advance and chose Rockin R for tube rental and transportation (put-in and drive-back following the one-way float-down).  Service and facilities were good.  They had change rooms, restrooms, and a privately-owned pull-out location. 
2. We were in the river by 10:00 a.m. Sunday.  You want to maximize your sanity?!  Get there early, wherever "there" happens to be. Rockin R actually had a recorded phone message noting that they "now open at 8:00 a.m.", but with multiple families, breakfast, packing up and checking out of our rented condo, etc., it took us a bit of extra time to get there.  Despite our delay, our Rockin R driver noted that we were his first group of the day, a comment which will tell you exactly what you need to know about the crowd distribution. 
3. We were out of the river by 12:30 p.m. Sunday, just when things were starting to get truly crazy (it did not help our sanity goal that we were forced to do this during the last full weekend before the start of school, but we had to mesh different family schedules).  By that time of the day, there were no parking spots remaining anywhere near Prince Solms Park, which is the tubing put-in area for both self-propelled and rental patrons alike.  Fortunately, Rockin R Comal allowed us to leave our vehicles in their parking lot such that we could walk one block to Pat's Place for lunch when we got back at 12:30 p.m.

Here's a screengrab from Googlemaps showing the location of Comal Rockin R, Pat's Place, and Prince Solms Park. 

This Google pic must have been taken on the coldest day of the winter, because there's nobody there!!  This is the location in Prince Solms Park where folks mount their tubes for the float downstream. 

I don't have any decent photos of this float because my cameras are not waterproof.

You and all your stuff will get wet on a trip down the Comal River - no way around it.  This is a close-up of the first "tube chute".  None of us got dumped completely out of our tubes, but one parent did lose her expensive sunglasses in these rapids. 

There's an additional advantage to being on the river early: you get to see the regular river denizens, the local characters who have the good sense to stay away when crowds are at their peak.

We were amazed and delighted to see dogs riding on stand-up paddle boards (SUPs), dogs running happily along the banks, and dogs swimming beside their owners, some of whom were out for their morning exercise.  This chocolate lab stole everyone's hearts as he dutifully followed his Australian-crawling master for quite some distance upstream.

Screengrabbed from www.riverfotos.com, which is a vendor that takes photos from the edge of the river and sells them online.  Most tubers don't have waterproof cameras so this is a neat service.  I bought one of our group. 

I didn't see any alcohol use that Sunday morning.  I didn't hear any screaming or partying.  Most of the folks on the river at that early hour were quiet family-oriented people interested in relaxing.  There were numerous other tubers present, but it wasn't an oppressive or obnoxious crowd.

What I did see was a view into an extraordinary river whose natural beauty has not yet been totally crushed by the overwhelming public demand for access to it.  I saw many fish and a baby turtle.  I teased a pair of bizarre-looking ducks by tossing bits of vegetation as if they were the Cheetos the quackers were hoping for instead (they paddled behind my tube briefly, but soon became wise to the ruse and departed for better pickins).  With unobstructed views through the crystalline and bracing spring water that feeds the river, my mind flashed back to scenes from The Unforeseen, which is a stunning documentary about an analogous natural area called Barton Springs in nearby Austin.  Somewhere in all of this thronging, no-parking mess, there is a balance between preservation and public access, but as both Louv and The Unforeseen have shown in the most emotionally wrenching ways, that balance is no longer easy to find. 

Austin ramble: Two great eateries

It's been a rough couple of years for food around Clear Lake.  Three of my favorite restaurants reportedly closed because of owner decisions (Korean BBQ, Dimassis, and Hans Mongolian Wok) and two others were destroyed by Hurricane Ike (Portofino in Clear Lake Shores and Pappadeaux in Seabrook). 

I'm getting tired of seeing captions like this...

...and this.

Internet chat suggests this Pappadeaux was closed due to issues with location, location, location more so than hurricane, hurricane, hurricane.  In being very difficult to get to on the opposite side of the channel as the Kemah attractions, it reportedly wasn't drawing the profits that its owners expected.

I typically don't like restaurants that I believe promote obese-a-thon style eating (and that pretty much includes 90% of the restaurants out there, in my opinion), but this one made a very good grilled seafood shish kabob which I could get them to serve with grilled asparagus rather than a bunch of starchy rice.  That was literally the only thing I ever ate there, but it was worth paying for. 

That's five restaurants down the toilet, which leaves me with almost no local recourse.  Which is why, when I did a quick trip to Austin last week, I jumped at the chance to get some decent food at a few of my favorite places.

Here's the ultimate in Bad Blogging Form: showing a restaurant dish partially eaten!!  Gross!!  But my daughter and I were so happy to finally get decent restaurant food that taking photos took a distant back seat to enjoyment. 

That's the artichoke dip at Marye's Gourmet Pizza in Westlake Hills.  It is literally the best I've had in my entire life. 

I have yet to find a single decent gourmet pizza source anywhere in greater Houston, even though Houston is the eating capital of America. 

Most Houstonians, especially suburbanites, probably don't even know what a gourmet pizza is.

This should clarify the matter.  Artisanal ingredients (to the extent possible) are worth paying for because the taste is so much better. 

Screengrabbed from the Marye's Gourmet Pizza website. 

Even when I go to a "better" restaurant in the Clear Lake area, mostly what I'm eating is some combination of the following:

• Feedlot beef (recognizable by its taste)
• Factory-farmed vegetables, and/or
• Farm-raised fish that tastes like little more than antibiotic-ridden alfalfa, no matter what atrocious oil-ridden paste it's "smothered" in. 

Irrespective of the moral implications, how could anything raised in these conditions taste even remotely good?!

This is a screengrab of a "we don't do this" cattle feedlot example pic shown by Live Oak Natural Beef as a counterpoint to their own operations.   These types of smaller artisanal farms and ranches are becoming increasingly popular for obvious reasons - because they supply an alternative healthier grass-fed, non-mass-produced product that simply tastes a whole lot better.  People will gladly pay for stuff that tastes better. 

My other Austin favorite is the old standby, Kerbey Lane Café.

The original location, on Kerbey Lane. 

The situation is absurd.  One can now go to the League City HEB grocery store and buy Kerbey Lane's famous pancake mixes.  But find a decent pancake at a restaurant in League City or Clear Lake??  Forget that. 

Hell, for that matter, you can buy the stuff on Amazon. 

It's just a pancake, but it's a good one.  I'm not looking for gourmet 5-star exotic restaurants.  Just simple restaurants that offer better-tasting dishes based on higher-quality ingredients. 

Oh and by the way, the ingredients in the box are allegedly not exactly the same as the ingredients in the restaurant pancakes, because obviously they need to keep luring people back to the restaurants, so they can't give away every secret.  You have to go to Kerbey Lane Café itself to get the true original pancakes. 

In sum, I don't know why the suburbs of Houston can't support better restaurants.  With a small number of notable exceptions (e.g., Chuyos), all I've found is the usual chains and franchises and unimaginative mass-produced slop.  But if you're ever in Austin, check out those two mentioned above, especially Marye's.  You won't be sorry.