If you dig deep enough in central Texas you might just find a big hole in the ground. That’s what happened back in 1963, when the highway department was taking core samples of bedrock limestone in preparation for the construction of I-35. In Georgetown, 25 miles north of Austin, the drill went clear through the limestone and hit an air pocket. After widening the 40-foot-deep hole to a skinny 24 inches, they sent a man with a flashlight down on the drill bit to investigate.

This is what he found.

Inner Space Cavern had been a sealed cave for 10,000 years, with only a few sinkholes here and there to betray its presence—”bone drops,” where prehistoric animals like woolly mammoth fell to their deaths; their remains have been found in the cave. Over time the sinkholes had filled in, and no humans had ever entered. After the highway department discovered it, road construction continued nearby. Meanwhile, the privately owned cave opened to the public in 1966. You can hear the faint rumble of I-35 traffic from deep inside the cavern in certain places.

Thanks to the steady dripping of calcareous water, the cavern has a number of beautiful formations. I was delighted by these “soda straws,” formed by calcium-filled water dripping for eons from the ceiling.

Enormous stalactites and stalagmites bridge the gap between floor and ceiling.

A close-up of the soda straws, still dripping and lengthening at an infinitesimally slow pace.

For anyone who’s interested, I took these photos on my point-and-shoot’s Sport setting, which creates a grainier image but helps reduce blurriness from a hand-held in dim lighting conditions. No tripods are allowed, and to preserve the cave you aren’t allowed to touch anything, which means you can’t brace your camera. I refrained from using my flash, which I feared would flatten everything out and overexpose the white formations, and relied instead on the dramatic artificial lighting in the cave.

Unfortunately, without people in the pictures, it’s very difficult to get a sense of scale. Well, that just means you’ll need to go for a visit yourself. At a constant 72 degrees F, it would make an idyllic diversion for a hot summer day.

All material © 2006-2009 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Drive just 30 miles southwest of Austin to find one of the most beautiful natural areas in central Texas: Hamilton Pool Nature Preserve. Last Saturday we drove out for a hike, arriving about an hour after it opened, and found something we’d never experienced there before: no one else. The serenity and beauty of the place made me feel like I was in heaven. For a while I just sat and gazed around me.

Hamilton Pool is a collapsed grotto. The limestone roof caved in thousands of years ago, creating a circular opening in the domed roof, part of which still arches over the clear pool below, where swimming is permitted if the water quality is good (nesting swallows in the cliff above the pool and pollutants from runoff after heavy rains sometimes cause unsafe bacterial levels).

A 50-foot waterfall spills from the roof, and thanks to recent rains it flowed like a veil over the lip and traced an arc of ripples in the pool. Part of it splashes onto a large, smooth rock that rises out of the water—perfect for sitting on and letting the cascade cool you off on a hot summer day. A dirt trail leads behind the waterfall into the back of the grotto.

Looking up, you see ferns clinging to the damp limestone of the roof, growing upside down like a soft green fringe.

A steep, rickety stair provides access down the cliff on one side of the pool…

…and then you’re under the vast roof. Those slabs of limestone from the collapsed roof are huge, some of them about 20 feet long. If you squint into the middle left of the photo, you can see a blue-shirted figure at the top of one of the slabs. He’s six feet tall, which gives you a sense of scale.

Behind the stones the trail circles around the rear of the grotto. This part is flat and easy to walk on. Further on, you have to scramble over slabs of limestone to get all the way around.

Enormous conical stalactites hang from the roof, dripping with calcareous water and clothed with moss and ferns.

Around the other side, you can look back and see the stair, as well as the dotted line of ripples in the middle of the pool that marks each waterfall coming over the roof. The water is green because of the limestone and beautifully clear. Fish swim in the pool, and cliff swallows fly in and out over your head.

Another look.

There’s a small sandy beach on the sunny side of the pool, and I sat with shoes off and feet in the cool water while my family practiced their stone-skipping techniques. Three couples eventually showed up, awed as we were by the beauty of the place. One young couple stripped right down to swimsuits and dove in, enjoying the pool in a way I’ve yet to do. I was sure wishing I’d worn my swimsuit so that I could have backstroked under that waterfall when we had it to ourselves. Even so, we enjoyed a good half hour of paradise, and it was ours alone.

From the waterfall you can hike along Hamilton Creek through a box canyon for three-quarters of a mile to where it meets the Pedernales River (pronounced by locals “Purdanalez”). The creek is lined with majestic bald cypresses whose knees poke up out of the water, and huge boulders that have broken loose from the limestone walls over the millennia dot the canyon floor.

We spotted this toad along the trail, and he held still for a portrait. Perhaps he was charmed, as we were, by the magic of Hamilton Pool.

All material © 2006-2009 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

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4,650 miles. 20 days. One car. Two kids. A ton of luggage.

We just returned from a three-week road trip—an early-U.S. history tour, you could say. We wanted our kids to learn about the colonial era, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War, and see some of the great sights and monuments on the East Coast. Also, my husband and I both had family members coincidentally renting houses not far apart up in Maine, and they’d invited us to visit. With the promise of cooler weather and a grand, old-fashioned family adventure, we mapped our route, I hired a garden sitter to keep dragging the hoses around at home, and—gas prices be damned—we were off.

After two long days of driving, we detoured to see Niagara Falls, rationalizing adding a couple of hours to our day’s journey by saying the kids needed to see the most powerful waterfall in North America. (My DH and I saw it from the Canadian side one cold winter day more than a decade ago.)

That evening we rolled into Saratoga Springs, New York, home of Garden Rant‘s Michele Owens. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting fellow Ranters Amy Stewart at a book signing and Susan Harris and Elizabeth Licata at the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling here in Austin, so of course I couldn’t resist the opportunity to meet Michele as well. She and her amiable husband generously made time for our visit during a busy Friday afternoon, serving our road-weary crew refreshments on her screened porch overlooking her lovely town garden. Our kids ran off to play with hers and had such a good time they didn’t want to leave.

I’ve been a southern gardener all my life and didn’t recognize anything in Michele’s upstate NY garden except hydrangeas and roses. Even her boxwood looked different. So when she showed me around, I think every other question I asked was, “What is this?” She told me I’d come during a transitional time in her garden, but it was cloaked in shades of green, and a collection of white flowers, including the hydrangeas in the photo above, simply glowed in the evening light. Thanks, Michele, for sharing your garden with me and for your hospitality.

The next day we visited Ft. Ticonderoga, which put on a 250th-anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Carillon in the French and Indian War. Thought not as hot as Austin, it was very warm, and I was impressed that the reenactors could stand to wear their tights, heavy layers, corsets, etc. People wore a lot of clothes a few hundred years ago, didn’t they? However, the Indian reenactors wore, ahem, very little—just a loincloth and leather leggings. I was too shy to photograph those brave fellows. Click here for a look at the King’s Garden near the fort.

This plea at a quaint rest stop in Vermont cracked me up.

We spent a lovely 4 days in Orr’s Island and Round Pond, Maine. Here are a few of my favorite scenes: the Maine coast, above.

Whitewashed lighthouse.

Lobster buoys on a shingled shed.

Heading south, we stopped near Boston in historic Concord to visit the site of the Shot Heard Round the World (the start of the Revolution), Louisa May Alcott’s house, and this old cemetery, where U.S. flags decorated the graves of veterans born in the 1700s.

We ended up in the Big Apple over Independence Day weekend, and on the 4th of July we enjoyed a tour of the Statue of Liberty and nearby Ellis Island, where shiploads of immigrants entered the U.S. in the 1800s and early 1900s.

It was special to us to see the Statue of Liberty and read the poem inspired by her on our nation’s day of celebration of independence and freedom.

We stayed at a hotel in the Financial District, cattycorner from the former World Trade Center and with a sobering view from our room of the construction there. Reflecting on the promise of freedom and welcome embodied in the Statue, contrasted with the values of the 9/11 attackers, provided plenty of food for thought.

But it wasn’t all somber reflection on our visit to the greatest city in the world. We played in Central Park, saw Wicked on Broadway (fantastic!), ogled dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, ate NYC-style pizza, wandered through Chinatown, and window-shopped in the grand stores around Madison Ave.

Next came Philadelphia, where we saw Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and a detour to the incredible garden Chanticleer. A few days later we arrived in Washington, D.C., where we took an evening stroll (which turned into a death march) to visit the monuments, including the Washington Monument pictured above.

Here’s the Jefferson Memorial.

D.C. was hot and humid, but not as bad as Austin, and we enjoyed the Smithsonian museums, a tour of the Capitol building, Arlington Cemetery, and the other memorials and monuments. But after NYC, we found it hard to get around in D.C. There’s little parking, the Metro stops are few and far between, and distances between attractions are long and hot, especially for children. Plus, we thought the Mall looked tired and unkempt (the grassy areas were half dead and straggly, temporary wooden fencing marred the views, and lights along sidewalks were out), not befitting the nation’s capital. I hear that renovations are being proposed for the Mall, and I think a makeover is definitely in order.

After Washington, D.C., we drove to Colonial Williamsburg for a day of history and fun, and then to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson (above).

Jefferson was crazy about plants and gardening, and the reconstructed gardens emulate the grounds as he knew them. Pictured here is the long vegetable garden. Closer to the house are the flower beds, where, according to the official brochure, “[t]wenty-five percent of the flowers cultivated at Monticello were North American natives, and the gardens became, in part, a museum of New World botanical curiosities.” Jefferson was a native-plant enthusiast who left detailed records of his plants and sketches of his designs. Surely he would have been a garden blogger had he lived today.

We finished up our trip with a tour of Mammoth Cave, the world’s longest cave, in Kentucky, then had two more long days of driving to get home. It was wonderful to have several weeks of unstructured family time, and I hope the kids have lasting memories from the trip.

My only complaint about the trip was that our itinerary, packed with sightseeing and many destinations, left no time to visit the many garden bloggers along our route. We passed oh-so-close to the homes of Cold Climate Kathy, Ranter Elizabeth Licata, Art of Gardening’s Jim, Ranter Susan Harris, Clay and Limestone’s Gail, and Ledge and Gardens’ Layanee—and it pained me not to be able to stop by for a visit. However, as my family rightly pointed out, this was not strictly a Pam vacation. Alas. :-)

If you’ve had any trouble accessing my site in the past couple of days, you’ll have noticed that Digging was temporarily suspended by my server. A malicious hacker was apparently using my site to attack another server, and when Bluehost discovered what was going on they abruptly shut down my site (and my email account). Needless to say, this was an unpleasant event at the Penick household, but my computer guru spent long hours last night upgrading our software to try to get the lowlife out of the system. We’re not sure all the bugs have been worked out with the upgrade, and my design site is still not fixed, but Digging is at least up again. Please let me know if you see anything amiss with the site as we continue to straighten things out.

All material © 2006-2008 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.