Carlsbad Caverns National Park

From Will: The overall experience of going out of our way to see these massive caves was very enjoyable. Although the campground that we were staying at lacked electricity, our solar panels came through with enough energy to last us a night. The chosen spot of camp was in the middle of nowhere, so you could see (and run) for miles. As for the actual caverns, I thought that it would be a relatively normal cave experience, but they just kept on going. It was MENTAL how big the cave was. We had the opportunity to learn a lot about the science and early exploration and discovery of the cave. A man named Jim White discovered the cavern in 1901 and dedicated his career to exploring the underground network. It was bone-chilling seeing the equipment that White and his team used to map out the cave. I have a lot of respect for that man and his team of researchers. Overall, I would say that our short stay near Carlsbad Caverns was a big success. See you again soon! Overall Rating: 8.6/10

From Tamsin: This stop of the trip took effort to get to and get to the next stop from but it was SO worth it. As Will said, the dry camping went well for us. I had been so nervous to do it but we had plenty of power and water for everything. I did do all our cooking using the propane and Will took an amazingly short shower but I don’t think we tested our limits. We even watched our Come Follow Me lesson on the TV. The caverns themselves were absolutely amazing. It was a lot different than I remember but still spectacular. There are some crazy stories about it’s original exploration. I should have gotten a picture of the ladder made of fencing used in the original exploration–crazy!!! There was an informational sign that said ring tailed cats, nocturnal animals, sometimes come into the cave. After that Zina was VERY focused on finding a cat, never mind that I explained the concept of nocturnal! We walked down the natural entrance, now a switchback trail, and after viewing the cave we took the elevator back to the top. By the way, Zina designed the matching family sweatshirts.

Zina had purchased a birthday present for Calvin that I would need to mail back to Pullman. I didn’t really want to drive to a post office so told the kids I was offering a $5 reward if someone spotted a Post Office. Then I forgot about that. As we were driving out of Carlsbad Caverns through a wide spot in the highway called Whites City, Zina spotted a post office! It took me only five minutes to mail the package. We went back to our campsite and packed up the trailer and headed out towards our next stop. In my original planning, I had made a big error and thought Carlsbad was only 3 hours from San Antonio but it turned out to be 7 hours. We were tired of driving only 3 hours into the trip (we had hoped to go 4 hours on Monday) so we decided to overnight in Fort Stockton. Our GPS flaked at the worst possible moment and we missed our exit by about 10 feet and ended having to go an additional 16 miles, eight out and eight back AND David had to get the trailer completely straight to go through an extremely narrow and marginally short tunnel under the freeway to get turned around. There is NOTHING in West Texas. The next day we needed gas and there was only ONE station in 100 miles and then that station was low on diesel and it took 30 minutes to get 4 gallons out of the tank!