1st – 5th Dec
We left our roost in the Guadelupe Mountains in an ongoing cool brisk breeze but glorious sunshine. Our mini convoy of two truck campers cruised the easy 40 miles over the ongoing desert plains dotted with oil wells, across the border into New Mexico and to the tourist-activity-of-the-day, a visit to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. We followed the tail of our new buddies up the hill to the visitors centre, parked up and set off on one the most spectacular 2 mile walks that I think I have ever done.
The Cavern complex was discovered in 1898 by a teenager called Jim White, who explored it with a homemade wire ladder and gonads bigger than mine. By 1923 it had been declared a National Park and visitors were descending the 230m into the caverns down a narrow switchback path, using rickety ladders and steps to get into the numerous rooms. By 1932 two elevator shafts had been sunk to link the main cavern room with the surface. Now it has a new visitor centre with shop and cafe at the top, 4 elevators, and a cafe underground. You can get the elevator down, but there is now an amazing path that winds down from the visitor centre into the mouth of the cavern, through numerous chambers and rooms into the Big Room, an enormous chamber 8.2 acres in size. There are countless formations, fabulously lit, and the whole journey to, and around the Big Room is 2 miles long. It was stupendous. Epic. Photographs do it no justice at all.
The outer rooms are also home to another large population of Mexican Bats which put on a great show as they leave at dusk to feed. They, like the Austin bats that we did not see because they had already gone to Mexico for the winter, had already gone to Mexico for the winter. Don’t blame them either.
We surfaced by elevator and all had lunch in the cafe before saying our goodbyes to Val and Wayne, who were heading back to Colorado via a night in Roswell. We weren’t going that far. Our next stop was in a park north of Carlsbad for 3 nights, where we had arranged a mobile RV repair guy to come out to mend our water heater. Carlsbad is not a pretty place. What was a small town servicing the caverns is now a large sprawling conurbation servicing an oil boom. Most of the workers, who are predominantly single men, live in featureless dusty RV parks and the main strip was a collection of food joints, liquor stores and truck sales and service shops. I imagine this place is quite a harsh place to live. After a brief stop for provisions we escaped the town and headed 20 miles north to our camp for the next 3 nights. We had no plans to do anything for the next few days, so being out of town didn’t matter at all. We quite successfully achieved our goal of nothingness with the addition of:
1) a 3 mile stroll down a track from the camp to a nearby reservoir. This was billed as a ‘nature trail to bird refuge’, but the reality was ‘dry, dusty, rutted track littered with beer bottles, plastic bags and spent shotgun cartridges leading to body of water with a couple of coots drifting around on it’. It was a bit optimistic to have taken the binoculars.
2) Three loads of laundry.
3) Getting a BBQ dinner from the camp kitchen. We had to not only order our meal in the morning, but also book a time slot for it to be prepared. We snagged the very latest slot available, which was 6.30pm. This is the land of the early dinner.
4) Getting the water heater fixed. Warren, the RV fixit guy came and after an hour of diagnostics, seemingly fixed it. He is now the 4th person to be involved with this blasted heater, but by far and away the most competent. We were disappointed the next day, when, as we prepared to leave Carlsbad area, it didn’t seem to be working fully. After a phone call he arranged for an assistant to drive another part out to us. I replaced this that evening, but to no effect. Our hearts were heavy with the prospect of having to arrange another person to come and look at it, and spending even more money on it, at some future point on our travels. But then we managed to magically fix it by……. flipping the fuse switch back into the ON position! Still not sure if this had tripped, or been left off by Warren, but who cares. Hot water is hot water. Hoorah!
Our next stop in ‘The Land of Enchantment’, as New Mexico is charmingly called, was Roswell. Alien City. Land of the little green men, the flying saucer, a plethora of naff gift shops and a whole heap of intrigue. It was a shortish drive through some fairly un-enchanting portions of New Mexico to this mythic town. It is, on the face of it, a town like any other, with a few notable exceptions.
- In July 1947 someone saw something odd, found some bits of something odd and reported it to the authorities. The military, who had an enormous presence in the area at the time, became very interested and took over ‘investigations’. What ever it was that the military were up to and had manage to stuff up was frantically covered up and the ‘little green men/flying saucer’ rumours were theatrically ‘quashed’ to feed the appetite of the conspiracy theorists and draw attention away from the truth. (That’s my opinion anyway.)
- Roswell needs alien conspiracy theories.
- Aliens are everywhere, especially the plastic/chainsaw sculpture/inflatable types.
- My husband was very excited about coming here because he, and bizarrely also my mother, believe that they are aliens themselves. (Nuts, the pair of them).
- In the visitors centre there are some friendly aliens that will pose for a photo for free. How friendly is that?
We came, we toured the museum, we had a burger lunch, we visited a very eclectic art gallery and we spent one night in a small RV park just out of town. The host was friendly here too.
