Epic Cross Country Road Trip August 30-31

 

August 30:  Monday  To Carlsbad Caverns

We start the day with a special brunch at a French restaurant/bakery.  I have a crepe with carmalized bananas.  Yum!  Nick has a delectable egg dish.  We buy some treats to take with us.

Melodie had sent me a travel link of towns in the US with funky folk art. One of them is not far off of our way to Carlsbad – Madrid.  Yes!  It does have funky art.  There is some fine art, some true folk art some junk and some imports for tourists.  It was also on the tourquoise trail.  Many years ago, tourquoise was mined.  Now it is mostly gone. 

We are certainly in the part of the country where the best restaurant in town is Mexican.  We chose a well rated one. It is also a meat market. We have tacos pastor and tacos al cabon.  It is good!

We sure have seen a lot of flat land and clouds this trip!

The closest town to Carlsbad Cavern is White City.  We stay here so we can go into the park to view the thousands of bats that leave the cave at sunset to go out and feed for the night. 

It’s about a 15 minute drive to the visitor center and then a short walk to the viewing area of the cave opening.  A ranger is answering questions.  When the bats start coming out, we’re to be as silent as possible.  Photos of any kind are prohibited.  There are swallows swooping.  They share the cave opening with the bats.  The swallows are the day shift and the bats the night shift. It is coming to the shift change.  A few bats come out and then more and more and more!  There is a sweet musky smell of the bats.  When cupping my ears, I could hear the fluttering of the wings.  The bats came out in waves.  I said 1000s but it is actually hundreds of thousands.  The bats migrate to Mexico but come back to this cave where they were born each year.  Each bat has one pup and will only nurse their own pup.  All the pups are left in a nursery while the parents go out and feed. We stay for about half an hour silently watching.  When it gets too dark, you can’t see the bats against  the dark sky.  The next day we saw the ranger in the cave  who had given the talk.  He said that after everyone had left and it was really dark that another huge wave exited.  He couldn’t see them because it was so dark but he heard them. 

August 31: Tuesday    Carlsbad Caverns and McDonald Observatory

We have reservations to enter the cave anytime between 9:30 and 10:30.  We aim for closer to 9:30.  There are choices as to how to see the caves.  Take the elevator both ways, walk one way and take the elevator the other way, walk both ways.  Recommendation is to walk down and take the elevator back up.  That is what we choose.  It is 1 ½ miles to walk down.  We enter through the opening where the bats came out last night.  

The path is quite steep at times.  We leave the twilight zone which is the area that gets some light from outside. 

This place is HUGE!  I think that we’re coming to the bottom and it keeps going with more switchbacks.  It is cool inside but the humidity is high so I still find myself feeling quite warm.  Along the way, there are spotlights on various formations and informational signs. 

Eventually we reach the bottom where the elevators drop people off.  Here there is a choice of a short path or the 1 ½ mile path around this level of the cave.  We take the full, long path.  This is mostly on the level so is easy with lots of stops to read the signs, take pictures and admire.  Usually there are 2,000 to 4,000 people who visit the caves daily.  But during these times, the numbers are way down into the low hundreds.  It is really beautiful to not see or hear other people as we walk the path.  Some of the formations are huge and some are little inlets with hundreds of little baby stalactites.

  We entered the cave about 9:45 and left at almost 1:00.  As I said, this cave is HUGE!

Time to get in the car and head to Fort Davis where we will spend the night and is near to McDonald Observatory. 

There is another National Park nearby.  Guadelupe Mountain National Park.  It is mostly for hiking.  There isn’t a road that goes through it like most other National Parks.  There is a road that drives along side it though.  We take that and stop at the Visitors Center. I think we can count it in our National Park registry.  That makes 11 for this trip alone!

On to Fort Davis.  The scenery is more of the flat, dry, nearly uninhabited land.  Or uninhabitated by humans.  We finally get to Fort Davis.  What a charming little town!  We have reservations at the Limpia Hotel which turns out to be an old historic hotel across from the old courthouse.  Our room is actually across the street over their gift shop.  I walk around while Nick rests in the room. 

Side note – We’ve seen quite a few trains and they’re all really long!

We have tickets for a lecture tonight at the observatory but it is really cloudy.  Nick gets a text that the forecast is for it to clear and they are hopeful that they will be able to hold the lecture.  If we want to bail, they will refund the money.  Nope, we’re taking a chance that the couds will clear for us.  They do! Well mostly.  Some cloud cover near the horizon. 

On the way up to the observatory a huge longhorn sheep or goat crosses the road right in front of us!  Luckily, it wasn’t a closer encounter with it!   

When we get to the observatory, we can see that the parking lot is prepared for large crowds.  There are cars here but the parking lot is pretty empty.  We look at the exhibits and the gift shop until we get the instructions to follow the red lights to the amphitheater.  As it turns out, this is the last lecture that the professor is giving before his retirement from 30 years.  One of the questions in the Q&A was what was the most amazing thing he had seen in his 30 years.  He talked about a comet in 1996 which stretched across the sky.

He had a really strong lazer beam that he used to point out the constellations.  Between that help and the really dark sky, it was easy to see everything.  He pointed out how with the wobble of the earth tilt that over thousands of years, the star that points to true North has changed.  With that wobble, the zociac constellations no longer line up with the setting of the sun the way they did  when they were first recognized and determined.  Hmm.  Maybe I’m not really a Taurus…..