Winter Road Trip, Day 3

 

Wow. New Mexico is, well, vast and … vast. Oh, and mostly flat. And field-covered. The town of Carlsbad is completely underwhelming, which one would not expect given the spectacular caverns that are found right down the road. We actually chose a hotel based on safety for the first time in our travel lives.

BUT, the caverns were pretty incredible.

(that’s water reflecting there!)

And the kids had a Junior Ranger activity book to fill out – which, amazingly, they really did.

This is the “Natural Entrance” AKA where the bats fly out of when they are actually there. They are smart and spend their winters in Mexico, not New Mexico, so we didn’t get to see their exodus from the depths of the caverns. Bummer. At least we have Austin.

This one room was phenomenally humongous. We really kind of jogged it because we wanted to make it to Roswell in the afternoon and it took forever and ever to make it around. I had somehow erroneously gotten the impression that it was a single, roundish room with a nice flat floor. I’m not sure where that idea came from – it was filled with stalactites, stalagmites and columns. Go figure.

So we finally headed to Roswell, bummed that we were missing out on the open stores (they close up at 5pm), but we made a point of taking alien photos anyway.

And um, we have NO idea what this is. Honestly, there are tons of these signs like they’re nothing special. We think they are a UFO about to abduct a cow. Weirdness.

So – next day – Sipapu Ski Area, near Taos, New Mexico.