Take us to your leader.

 Thursday, April 19th

Oh, here we go again! The wind is back! 20-30 and increasing throughout the day.

We get up at 7 in order to be at Carlsbad Caverns when they open. That gives us hope of being out of there by the time other tourists have made it to the gate.

See, we'd gotten the word. Super-cheesy was the way it was described by a Marfa-ite. Another mentioned tourist trap. But still, it seemed that a huge cave operated by the National Park Service couldn't be that bad.

 And it wasn't -- at 8:30am. Since we were some of the first in the entrance, we were able to witness their bats returning to their roosts. We had lots of room to roam the 2+ mile route that was open to us. We even had the space to race 1-1/2 mile straight back up to the entry for some extra cadio --no elevator for us!

Not best pic, but hey, it was DARK.

I'm so glad we took this approach. As we returned to the entry ~10:30, we were greeted by some 100 middle schoolers, all descending into the cavern screaming and giggling and generally acting like it was Disney.

Whew! Dodged that bullet!

But we didn't dodge the weather bullet. We learned that high winds in White Sands meant that there would be white-out conditions there.

We chose to pass on it and go instead directly to Roswell. Surely there'd be an alien or 2 waiting for us! And look what we found!

On the way into Roswell


Seriously, Roswell was a nice little town. We visited the obligatory tourist shop, with its collection of really tacky t-shirts and books that expose the real story behind the 1947 alien encounter there.  Riiiiight....

Scott couldn't resist buying an alien ID, complete with a martian picture and the name A. Lien, address Mars. I've dared him to present it the next time we're carded.