Carlsbad Caverns

Elise and I spent a lazy morning just hanging around our cabin. Actually, we were out by 11:00, and since we never seem to get out much before 10:00 anyway, it wasn't such a lazy morning.
 

Carlsbad Caverns, Carlsbad, New Mexico



 We drove to White's City, which is the last human habitation before the Carlsbad Caverns. The town was named after the teenager who discovered and first began exploring the Cavern and who eventually became the Carlsbad Caverns National Park's first superintendent.                                          

The "town" consists primarily of a gas station, a gift shop, a motel, and two restaurants, one of which was already closed for the season. We had lunch at the restaurant, including a really delicious slice of apple pie, and then drove on to the Caverns.

We were early enough to buy our tickets for the 2:00 guided tour and also have time to browse the museum before taking an elevator more than 700 feet down to the floor of the Caverns. The elevator is an engineering marvel in itself and was at one time the third longest elevator in the world.

The cave was one of Mother Nature's more creative and fantastical efforts, with all sorts of strange figures and shapes - a little like Bryce Canyon but with a ceiling. As usual, the Park Service ranger who led the tour was excellent. At one point he turned off his lantern and all of the lights in the area of the cave where we were sitting, so that we experienced the total darkness of the Caverns. He also had a great suspense story of the time John White's lantern went out while he was exploring the cave and had wandered away from the lantern. He had only three matches to find the lantern and get it lit. Otherwise he would not have been able to find his way out of the Caverns. The first match turned out to be a dud; nevertheless, he did manage to relight his lantern. Even though we, of course, knew the happy ending of the story in advance, the story was still a well-told cliffhanger.



Latino supermarket, Carlsbad, NM

 Before dinner, we needed to do a small food shop and decided that we would take a break from Walmart (not that there wasn't one in town), and we did our food shopping at La Tienda, a Latino supermarket. In addition to a much greater variety of Latino foods than we would have found at Walmart, they also had a whole aisle of large pinatas displayed high on one of the walls.