Carlsbad to Albuquerque

In the morning after pushing through the west Texas dessert in the middle of the night, we awoke in Calrsbad, NM.  (It smells like a fart.  Who farted?  Carlsbad, NM.)  And made our way to Carlsbad Caverns.  and it was another trip where we spent way longer in the caverns then we expected to but it's very nice.  And easy to do with pets, they have a kennel service, and we kenneled Vicki while we were there.

Carlsbad is definitely a place to see how nature tourism has changed in the last 50 years in America.  You can walk down into the caves through the "natural" entrance, or you can do it the "modern" way and take one of the longest singe shaft elevators in the world to get to the bottom.  When you exit, you're in the main "lobby" of the caves, with a small souvenir stand, the bathrooms, (they have rock formations inside of them,) and the now defunct cafeteria in the cave.

The cave itself is amazing.  Bigger then you can describe.  I took a number of pictures, all useing low-light settings to capture some of the scale, but even when you're in side the cave, the size of various rock formations, or spaces between them is difficult to describe, because of the lack of normal things to compare to in your vision.

We were told by a ranger in the 60's and 70's the lighting the cave was much brighter and included many more colored lights.  We imagine it must've looked like a SPECTRE headquarters (probably on purpose.)  The ranger was also nice enough to use her flash light to point out some unlit formations.  The path around the cave was paved, though there were some parts that were not wheelchair accessible, due to steepness of the path angles.  Also, if you want to go, I'd say mid-week, off-season in the morning is the time to go.  We didn't see more than 20 people in the three hours we were there, so we had plenty of time to photograph the formations on our 2 mile walk.

Leaving Carlsbad, we got stuck in construction traffic, so we decided it was time for the self portrait.

We then drove north toward Albuquerque, and though we stopped in Roswell, the UFO stuff there is was overblown.  First, the UFO tourist attractions only take up one side of the street on one block, second, and I thought this was odd, the UFO museum posted, and described various photos and stated that they were fakes and how they were done.  Only the most unknown stuff was presented with an air of mystery.  Even evidence of the "Roswell Incident" was shown with things to demonstrate the case that it was a weather ballon.   Overall, not really worth the stop.

There's not a lot between Roswell and Albuquerque.  I knew we'd have to stop for gas, but the map showed three small towns between here and there.  Two of them apparently don't exist except on the map and the third's only gas station closed.  So, we were white-knuckling it trying to get to I-40 for gas.  It was the closest we came to running out of gas on the trip, and though it was evening, and not particularly hot outside, there was no-one else on the road.  We turned off all the electronics we could, slowed down some, and watched the odometer turn, and the Garmin tell us how far we were from gas.  Thankfully, we made it into Clines Corners.  Apparently pushing it it was people do around there, we met three travelers at the stop who did the same thing.  After filling up, we made it into Albuquerque without incident.  Having had enough adventure for the day, we ordered a pizza, and went to be.