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When you can get there, you can learn a lot 300 feet inside the Earth.

Those missile-size icicles dangling from the cavern's roof? They don't look securely attached. No worries, our guide said; they're all as solid as rocks. Actually, they're as solid as calcium carbonate, but close enough.

Our college-age guide had led my family deep into Moaning Cavern, one of several natural caves open for tours in California's Gold Country.

Here we also learned that the huge cave fangs pointing down are called stalactites and those jutting up from the floor are stalagmites.

What happens here in an earthquake? Good question. One I asked. It turns out that several hundred feet down is the right place to be during such a natural disaster. The quake would roll right over us, the guide said. We probably wouldn't feel a thing.

Even before a trio of quakes rattled California in June, I found this informational nugget comforting. It was the first in a mother lode my family unearthed in and around Gold Country's caverns that month.

Without breaking much of a sweat, my wife, two young sons and I visited a literary landmark, explored a historic Gold Rush town, tasted local wine, panned for gold and, of course, ventured into the belly of the Earth. One quick disappointment: Despite the name, Gold Country has no readily available gold lying around. I looked.

But what these Sierra foothills lack in free precious metals they make up for in another commodity Americans value: Mark Twain.

Angels Camp, where we stayed, holds a couple of firm claims to the Twain legend. The first is that as a young man the pioneering American writer lived there for about three months in a one-room cabin just outside of town. He was there, like practically everyone else, to prospect for gold.

The cabin on Jackass Hill — no kidding — looks largely as it did in 1865 when Twain slept and smoked there. The abode is humble, if not downright spartan: a stone fireplace, a couple of windows and the front door. From the looks of it, there was little to do except write.

According to a plaque on the site, Twain met some nonfictional characters, which later figured into "Roughing It," his famous, mostly true, adventures of the American West from 1861 to 1866.

Our 3- and 5-year-old sons were less than captivated by the empty wood shack (especially because it was a stop on the way to the much-hyped caverns). But if we couldn't ruin a child's good time with a little education, what kind of parents would we be? A nearby sign warning of rattlesnakes noticeably buoyed their spirits.

Angels Camp's best-known connection to Twain is that it serves as the location for one of his first published short stories, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

According to local lore, he overheard a saloon patron regaling his drunken comrades with the tale, embellished it himself in the retelling, and thus began his journey into American literature.

To frogs and wine