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| Miles Traveled: 312 Total miles: 3963 Stops: Music selections: Click on highlighted words for pictures... |
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Today again reminded me why this road trip was a great idea... As
I sit here in the hotel room and write this tonight, I'm feeling great,
and thankful that I am alive to be seeing all these beautiful things
that have graced my eyes today. This planet is truly amazing.
I awoke in Odessa, wondering what Carlsbad Cavern would be like and excited to see what was in store for me... But first, I had got an email from Gabriel (WS6Warez), who lived in Odessa, wondering if I would like to get together for lunch.. I gladly accepted. Gabriel, his friend Josh, and I went to a place called "Logan's" in Odessa. It's a very cool local steakhouse... they have in house butchers that cut the steaks right there. The coolest part is that they offer up peanuts to all the patrons, and you throw the shells on the floor... so it has this kind of backwoods, old style, kinda feel to it. The portions were HUGE, too, there's no way I could eat it all... but damn was it good! Gabriel and Josh were both really cool guys, and we had some good conversation... but they both had to get back to work, and I had to hit the road... Before I left Gabriel gave me a CD of some comedy songs, which I threw in the CD player on my way out of town... Damn, talk about some hilarious stuff! There was a song called "Prison Bitch" that had me laughing so hard I almost had to pull over. Construction sites along the road had me saying "orange barrels, orange barrels, orange barrels" over and over.. Thanks, dude! The dust devils were fucking with me on the road. There was a thunderstorm on the horizon, and it made the visual just right so that if there was a dust devil tearing across a field, it looked like there was a tornado on the ground on the horizon. Talk about freaky. I had to do more than a few double takes on them.. Here's a few random pics from the last miles in Texas... It was about 2:00 when I crossed the New Mexico border heading towards Carlsbad, and I took a turn off to head for the caverns... I think this is the farthest out in the middle of freakin nowhere I have been on my trip so far. It's hard to say if anyone lives in the houses out there, some of them look like they've been abandoned for years. I arrived at the Caverns at around 3:00, only to see that entrance to the main cavern entry is closed at 2:00 pm daily... The explanation for that comes a little later... But the Big Room tour was still open, so I paid my fee and hopped on the elevator to plummet 750 feet to the caverns below. I took a ton of pictures inside the caverns, so I'll just post them as links here.. Caverns1 - Caverns2 - Caverns3 - Caverns4 - Caverns5 - Caverns6 All I can say is that pictures can not even begin to capture the sheer magnitude of how incredible the caverns are. It's a 360 degree cornucopia of visuals. You find yourself standing in one place, and looking around in circles trying to absorb the immensity of what your eyes are taking in. I took a lot of pictures while I was in the caverns, but many of them came out blurry due to the low light conditions. As you can see above, though, I did manage to get some shots of the breathtaking landscape inside the caverns. It's like looking into a time capsule that covers millions of years of history, and realizing just how minute your portion of that history is. You think of the people who discovered the caverns, and how it must have been for them to see these things for the first time, lit only by a kerosene lamp. It's truly a humbling experience. After touring the Big Room, I had a little time to kill so I went out and snapped some pictures of the amazing vistas surrounding the visitor center. The building itself is perched high atop a mountain, and you can look out over hundreds of miles of the valley below. It's hard to believe that this entire area was once underwater. Here's the pictures from the park surrounding the caverns. Dusk was approaching, so I headed back up to the visitor center for the reason the caverns closed early.... Around dusk every evening in the summer, the large number of bats that live in the caverns come out to feed on the insects that populate the region.... It's estimated that there are currently 100,000 bats living in the caverns in an area called.... oddly enough... The Bat Cave. As dusk falls, they being spiralling up out of the caverns in large swarms, and then fly out across the valley. It was eerie, but at the same time very cool to watch. Darkness was falling and it was time to hit the road... so I hopped in the Alero and set my course for the UFO capital of the world - Roswell, NM. Another evening at the Motel 6. Tomorrow morning I'll head down the the UFO Museum, and then it's off to Holbrook, Arizona to sleep in a teepee. After that, the Grand Canyon, and then.... VIVA LAS VEGAS, baby!! <<previous ----- <<schedule>> ----- next->> |
