California Roadtrip Day 5.1 : Saturday Morning

Awesome!!! I wake up refreshed after my first time EVER camping. Camping is pretty cool... it's nice getting in touch with nature even if it is 5 feet away from a main highway.

So we decided today was going to be our tourist day. 1st stop- a small detour to Carlsbad Caverns (the home of Caverns spanning OVER 50 football fields and more than 1 million bats who migrate twice a year and leave the caves in whirlwind formation at night). We make our way though red dusty mountains full of cacti and tumbleweed, up semi-steep slopes and blasting cold air, and find ourselves at the top of a mountain in a little nest full of adobe lodgings and native-american tee pees.

Under all of this is where the caverns lie.

We buy the tickets (pretty cheap if you ask me at $15 a pop), and make our through a small lane to the entrance of the MAIN CAVE. Awesome. If you've never been to a cavern than I completely suggest that you get yourself a present and go, because what I am about to describe is not nearly CLOSE to what it was really like.

The completely-independent tour lasts 2 hours. (Independent as in no tour guide). We went almost 200 miles below ground in 30 minutes, winding our way through castles of dew and fairy homes and bottomless pits. For the next hour and a half we walked (legs ACHING) around in the middle of the earth, trying to take pictures but failing miserably, amazed at the fact that the air was COOL and not hot. Reds, blues, whites, blacks. Rocks that looked like cloth, rocks that looked like water, rocks that looked like Ronald Reagan and skeletons and ice cream.

An interesting happened at the end of the tour though. We walk through a little tunnel towards a sign that says "Rest Area" and somehow find ourselves in a Mos Eisley bar. The last room in the tour was nothing but a huge underground market place, great circles of light gathered together for the sole purpose of making a buck. It was really weird.

At the end the only way up was through a glass elevator (if you can name both movies than kudos for you!), where you can see yourself moving past thousands of feet at break-neck speed. The elevator- run by a rickety old man who looked to be about a hundred- brings you back to the ticket booth/museum. There you can see people from 50 years ago making the journey that you just did without the fun of elevators or pathways.

We still had a long way to go. It was noon when we were left Carlsbad. In front of us lay our next stop: Roswell, New Mexico.

(To be continued to Day 5.2. Find out tomorrow what we did with the rest of our day.)