Blogs from Carlsbad, New Mexico, United States, North America - page 3

I left Artesia this morning heading south across the Llano Estacado: flat, featureless, and profoundly empty. I could be back in the rangeland of northern Wyoming (see , except that Wyoming has snow by now) with the same sapping effect on my sanity. I drove into this seemingly empty void for the same reason everyone does, to experience one of the most compelling natural features in the United States. Good thing it exists, because there’s almost nothing else for hours in all directions. Guadalupe Mountains Old signs started appearing along the road. They are a historic sight of a sort, because they have been there for over fifty years. They look it too. In glorious 1950s style graphics, the signs talk about various tourist facilities like food, motels, and gift shops. All of them end with ... read more

September 10-11, 2010: Our travel calculations were now focused on two objectives: to get to see Carlsbad Caverns in SE New Mexico and to be in Austin, Texas, by September 13th, so we could have some time with our nephew Brian before he had to leave for Ethiopia. This meant some serious driving for us. We put in a full day on the road. That's a full day for us—I know truckies would laugh at our progress—and there were plenty of lorries breezing past our little van when we ventured onto the interstate highway system. Friday night we got within coo-ey of Carlsbad, and stopped at the Brantley Lake State Park. It was pretty vacant, despite being the start of a weekend, but the sites were very nicely set up, with a blue shade roof for ... read more

Beep Beep - the Search for a Road Runner Oh my, I thought yesterday was “El Despoblado.” I wasn’t prepared for today. We left Ft. Stockton traveling on Route 285 towards Carlsbad National Park. Real Desert. This is oil country for sure, well after well drilled into the shale rock which supports only short grass, yucca and greasewood. This is extreme landscape, but beautiful in its starkness. I spent all day looking at the fence posts because I am on a mission to find a Road Runner. Paul says they are like the Jack-a-lope and don’t really exist. However, they are in my bird book and books don’t lie - do they? I will get a photo of a Road Runner. Carlsbad Cavern’s were spooky. We hiked what is called the “Natural Entrance”, a 1.25 miles ... read more

Well now, today was interesting. It finally made it up to 71 degrees but inside the cave it is 56 degrees all the time. We did the longest tour and it was self guided. Spectacular scenery and quite the workout. There was no need to follow up with tennis or volleyball afterwords. A few pictures turned out and few did not so naturally we decided to keep the ones that did. The trusty IPhone did well considering the low lighting down there. We were down there for about 3 hours. After that we did the Super Walmart for provisions and Sonics for a strawberry/banana shake. Now we are back at the coach resting up for the drive to San Antonio tomorrow (or at least most of the way). Sure happy to have the cold weather ... read more

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 ... read more