Tubing and spiders

Zoe and I went tubing down about 6 miles of the very slow Guadelupe river on Sunday. We rented three tubes from "Tube Haus" (many things around New Braunfels have a German theme)- one for each of us and one to carry the cooler full of lunch, snacks, drinks and sun block. It's a beautiful area, and the river is a nice mix of slow meandering, short rapids and interesting places to stop. We glided under big old trees thick with Spanish moss that would have looked at home in a bayou, paddled after turtles, and ducks who were so young they were still fuzzy. It wasn't long into the trip before Zoe was floating downstream assembling a little stack of cheese, turkey and crackers, as I built a salami and Easy Cheese sandwich on my belly like an otter. Well, if otters had ready access to Easy Cheese and salami.
Zoe's favorite stop was the spider cave. It was a neat little ledge/cave area eroded into one of the limestone cliff faces. The parts you can walk in are maybe a hundred feet long, with a few different levels of steps to climb around on. Some of the other kids noticed a hairy protrusion in one of the crevices around this area had some daddy long legs in it. They were grossed out, but Zoe and I were intrigued, so we examined them. It looked like a brown haired Fraggle was burrowed into the rock, but instead of hair sticking out they were really all spider legs and feelers. You could (and Zoe and I happily did) grab a fist full of them and pull them out. Then the big spiders- these were pretty uniform in size, spanning about 5 inches- would scramble around all over, and start bobbing up and down at you like angry lizards. They didn't seem to be injured by being picked out of the wall, but they did get agitated. The whole side of the cliff would just be covered with the bugs, dozens of them pulsing up and down and running around. We found 8 of these little enclaves of spiders in the first spot, and Zoe was enthralled with them. They'd get angry with us for a while, then slowly reform into their crack to do whatever daddy long legs do in their little congregations. If you're brave or really curious about what these look like, check out this video.
We floated down the river a short way farther and found a group of 20 somethings squealing about the spiders they'd found there too. A woman was being egged on by her friends to touch a little patch of them. Zoe wanted to tell them all she knew about the bugs as if she were host on the travel channel. She even asked me to advertise her show by bellowing to them about "The Amazing Zoe Spider Girl." They didn't care to listen so much until I helped her scramble up the ledge which looked oddly like a little stage. She stood before her audience with a grin on her face, and announced what the hairy wads were all about. Then she grabbed a handful of spiders and 30 or so of them cascaded in a column from her hands, scattering around her pink water shoes. The grown ups below her writhed, and itched and giggled. Zoe loved every minute of it, probably even more than seeing the baby ducks, or riding the rapids. Maybe even more than eating Easy Cheese straight out of the can on the river with her dad. She's only six, but she said it was one of the best days of her life. It was one of mine too.