On Friday we went off on a little road trip in our new car; we headed for Carlsbad Caverns.
Two strange things happened before we left. One was that we tried to book tours at the caverns and found that most of them were sold out. Sold-out tours in an out of the way national park a couple of days before Christmas? Strange. We managed to get two tickets for a 50 person tour on Saturday morning, and we were lucky to get them.
And then the night before we left, I was looking online at hotel and motel rooms in Carlsbad and found The Trinity Hotel, a little boutique hotel in a refurbished 1892 bank. The rooms were $249 a night, which: Ouch. That's a bit pricey for a two-bit, out-of-the-way town in south-eastern New Mexico. Still, I thought, nice place, maybe someday, and went to look at cheaper places like Motel 8's and La Quinta Inns. Those places turned out to be charging $279 per night. For a motel room! The absolute cheapest places (the ones with review that included mentions of roaches and mold and surly front desk clerks) were going for $99 per night.
What the heck is happening down in Carlsbad, New Mexico?
I googled around to find that there is a fracking/oil boom going on around Carlsbad, so the motel rooms are at a premium. Can you believe it? Fracking is the devil's work, and it's being done right here in our little old state.
So we thought we'd stay in Artesia (which is an ugly, smelly little town) or Roswell (which used to be an ugly, smelly little town but which is growing exponentially). When it came time to choose--after stopping for lunch at a restaurant called Peppers--we chose Roswell.
After lunch, we saw that we were about a half-mile from the Roswell visitors' center, so we decided to walk there and back to stretch our legs. The visitors' center turned out to be not much--a bunch of brochures for places other than Roswell--so, not expecting much, we went next door to the tiny art museum.
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| Bird Bride, Carlos Quinto Kemm, 2014 (detail) |
We stayed the night in a La Quinta Inn and the next morning headed out bright and early for the 90 minute drive to Carlsbad Caverns. Just outside of Artesia, we ran into this:
Fog! We never have fog in New Mexico, but conditions were just right. It slowed us down for a bit, until it burned off.
We did make it in time for our scheduled tour of the King's Palace.
They've started to include a part in the tour where they have everyone sit down on the trail and then they turn out the light. It's kind of insane to be in an environment where there is absolutely no trace of natural light, none. You can't see your hand in front of your face. It's so dark that the darkness seems to dampen the sound, even. Then the ranger lights a lantern or a match and talks about one of the earliest explorers of the cave whose lantern went out and, after a half-hour, he was on his last match before he got his lantern lit again.
I love Carlsbad Caverns. I've been there four or five times before and it never ceases to amaze me that I am walking around 800+ feet below ground. Amazing.
The bats were gone to their winter digs, of course, but we'll go back sometime in the summer to watch them. I love bats.
After our tour, we had lunch in the visitor's center and headed back to Roswell. We had an early dinner in the hotel (salads, steamed veggies, and chocolate) and went to bed.
Sunday we slept in, had an on-the-road Starbucks breakfast and took the long way home through Carrizozo, Lincoln, Capitan, and so on. We stopped briefly at the Gran Quivira ruins and then came home via Mountainair.
The cats were glad to see us! (We haven't told them that we're planning another trip in a couple of days.)
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