Roswell, Carlsbad, Hello Texas

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Left Santa Fe on Sunday headed for Texas. We stopped in Roswell at the Int'l UFO Museum & Research Center. Sounds more official than it is...lots of newspaper clippings (or should I say lots of different copies of the same newspaper clippings), and the highlight of it was the mock up of an alien from the movie "Roswell". As we were in Roswell, we HAD to stop, but I'm not thinking it's much of a destination trip...

On to Carlsbad to spend the night at the local Walmart parking lot. HUGE thunderstorm...and lasted for a few hours!! We got up Monday morning and headed to the caverns. Pretty amazing and well worth the stop...spent 2 1/2 hours exploring the "Big Room". Back on the road headed for Texas...made it to a rest area about half the way to Austin and spent the night.

Tuesday afternoon we made it to Austin. We did have to make a stop in Luckenbach...I was totally surprised...I had no idea that there was a post office, and that's it!! Well, it does have a bar in the back, and there's a dance hall, and about 3 houses. We got our touristy pics and headed back on the road. Chose a forest service park outside of Austin - McKinney Falls State Park...the reviews said cheap, but it ended up being $30/night by the time you added $5/person to the $20 camping fee. And they lock the gate at 10pm, so we had to have a code for the lock...decided we'd park for 1 night and find something else...

So after we got situated, we headed for "town" :) Only to find that parking in Austin is a nightmare. We had chosen a couple of venues to check out before we left the coach...got to the first one, which was a brewery...the sign said: "tons of parking in the garage"...nope...not only were there NO parking spaces left, at the end of each row you had to BACK out...and we were NOT the only ones who didn't understand this BEFORE we ventured in the place...what a trainwreck!!!

Off to the next venue...plenty of parking across the street, but the line snaked around the block and there was a $20 cover each to get in...as it wasn't particularly anyone we were interested in listening to, we headed for downtown Austin. Found a parking spot marked: "No parking 7am-7pm". It was after 8pm. Sweet!! (and there was only one spot left along the street....)

We walked around the corner to 6th street...lined with venues...all had live music...NICE!!! We ventured into a pub and listened to a couple of college students playing guitar. Left there for a club around the corner that had a blues band. Really good, but didn't catch their name. The guitar player was really talented. We had just decided to call it a night, when much to our surprise, we looked out the open door to see our car on a flat bed tow truck!!! We both jumped out of our seats and ran out the door. Glenn ran across the street to hail the driver, but the light turned and he was GONE!!! We looked back up the street where we had been parked and saw a police officer parked there. We went over to ask him what the deal was...he showed us that turned at about a 45 degree angle to the sign we noticed there was an additional sign (on the same post...) that said: "No Parking 9pm - 3am"...hmmmmm...and surprise, surprise, there is a taxi stand located just across the street from this "infamous" no parking zone. I say that because the taxi driver, the guy at the tow yard, and several Texans we've met since then have all assured us it's a trap, and we fell right in!!! Bummer!!! Fortunately the tow fee wasn't too horrible, and the only thing injured was our pride!!!!

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