Dietz Summer Road Trip

After a day like yesterday, we are hoping that today will be better! We woke up, John’s finger was still bandaged and not bled through so we were good to go. 

Today we drove about 4.5 hours north west across Texas into New Mexico and the Mountain time zone. Along the way we saw a few dust devils, possibly one road runner, and some pretty flat land. It was a really easy drive to get to Carlsbad. 
We arrived at the information center for the Carlabad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains. This was the address from our National Parks guide. We found out we were about 30 minutes from the caverns. So we headed in that direction and ate lunch when we got there. Nothing special, we hadn’t stopped for lunch on the way so we just went to the park restaurant. 

  
Ok it was time to finally tour the caverns! This was our first national park of the trip so we bought the National Parks Pass for $80, good for both of us for an entire year to all the National parks. We are hoping we get our money’s worth out of it. We decided to do the self guided tour of the Big Room. There were a few tours you could take that were guided and took you even deeper into the caves and were a much longer hike. We were good with the 2 miles Big Room hike. 
So you decided down into the caves through the Natural Entrance. They also do Bat fly shows here at night.  

You descend into the caves on a winding switch back path. Oh cool a rock formation!!! Wow, wonder how far down we are? Are we at the bottom yet. Uhh not even close and you haven’t even seen the half of it. As you get deeper and deeper it gets grander and bigger. It’s hard to even explain it in a way that would do it any sort of justice. If you have ever been to a cavern (and if you grew up in PA you went to Penns Cave or Indian Caverns at least a dozen times), so think of those and forget everything you know. The Carlsbad Caverns are just amazing. You gotta go.  So here are some pics: 

After the hike, which was 750 feet underground and a decisive quadricep workout, we headed to our campsite for the night. We had reservations at the Carlsbad K. O. A. Which was nice if you had a bunch of kids to entertain and your idea of “becoming one with nature” was a lot of traffic. We got in around 6pm and arriving shortly after us was a massive storm which included wind, rain, thunder and lightening. We got the tent set up with just enough time to climb in before the storm started full force. Guess that first camp fire of the trip will have to wait until tomorrow??  So we are in the tent waiting out the storm and decided to just go to the camp clubhouse for dinner. Aka, French fries, Snickers and Coke. Finally the storm passed and we went out to the tent. 
  

It was still too wet to make a campfire so we went back inside to use the wifi. We stayed in there for a few hours because another storm moved in. So after being held hostage by the rain, we scampered back to our tent around 9:30 and promptly fell asleep with all of our fingers attached. 
Here’s hoping we can finally have our first fire of the trip tomorrow!