Road Trip!

Wildflower season isn't over yet, so I thought I'd try once more to find the sweeping fields of flowers that I'm so longing to see. I'd read that Marble Falls is a wildflower-heavy location, so we took the hour-long drive northeast out of Austin to see what we could find.

I can honestly say we did not find a shocking amount of wildflowers on the drive over, nor did I notice any wildflowers to speak of in Marble Falls - most likely because I don't really know where to look. It seemed that the best patches of flowers were along the highways right in and around Austin. But all was not lost - I planned ahead such that in the event we did not discover the desired wildflower treasure at the end of the journey, we would still have something else to explore. We drove just a little beyond Marble Falls and visited Longhorn Caverns. The picture is the entrance to the cave - all the pictures shot inside the cave were too dark to bother posting. It was a pleasant 70 degrees inside the cave - very nice respite from the warmer weather we've been having. Pretty neat place - during the prohibition years, the cave had served as a speakeasy complete with a dance-floor in a sizeable 'ballroom.'

After touring the cave, we took a hike along a short nature trail at the end of which were some old buildings. They were very sturdy buildings and looked surprisingly new for the age. One had a spiral staircase which you could climb to the top of a tower and lookout over the land.

Though I was a bit disappointed not to have found my long sought-after fields of wildflowers, I was glad we'd been able to explore yet another interesting part of Texas. But we weren't finished quite yet - just as we entered Austin, Chris noticed a side-road just off the highway that was lined with dense patches of bluebonnets. We quickly turned around and went back so I could take some pictures. It was just what I'd been looking for - lovely patches of blue dotted with the red of Indian paintbrush. A perfect end to a pleasant road trip.