Underground and aliens

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We got up early today because we had reservations for the 9:00 a.m. Left Hand Tunnel tour of Carlsbad Caverns. Our tour guide took us down into a less frequently used area with lanterns and answered a bunch of questions for us. Sam and Rece were more interested in this than most of the things on the trip. Sam asked lots of questions about the caves and what it was like to be a ranger.

We spent a lot of time over in the Big Hall, too. It was fascinating. Gabe took lots of pictures but my camera won't capture anything in low light so I didn't try. We wandered about 1/2 way through and took the short cut out. All in all, we spent almost 4 hours underground - it was really fascinating.

Once we came up, we hit the road again en route to our next stop - Roswell. We weren't expecting all of the airplanes there for retrofitting. We were expecting a plaque or something out there with some history but there wasn't anything. We knew it would be cheesy but it even surprised us. The UFO museum was quite interesting though. We spent over an hour there before we got coffee and headed out. We were headed to Soccorro, NM for our next stop.

On the way, we drove through the home of Smokey the Bear. It was closed but we got out and read the history. We also went through Lincoln - the hometown of Billy the Kid. Many of the old buildings were still there. More thunderstorms and lots of driving and we reached Soccoro. We decided that the Motel 6 where I'd made reservations wasn't a good idea - I think it was the guy vomiting outside the bar across the street that did it. So we moved to the Holiday Inn Express. Right next to the hotel was a cute little microbrew so we stopped for a fantastic dinner and a couple of beers before curling up with more X files.

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