New Mexico there and back again

After a busy day in alienated Roswell, next day, against our plans, we went back to Texas. Somehow we figured out reading a map that it'll be easier to get to Alamogordo taking a highway through northern Texas than New Mexican back roads. Well, we know it in Poland, it is still easier to get from the south to north going on German highways. It is nothing to be ashamed for New Mexico! Besides ad hoc we've decided to see Carlsbad Caverns - Maciek loves caves.

Road leading to caverns is very picturesque - it's winding through hills and once on top you can see the endless plateau. The entrance is 6 USD per person, but with annual interagency pass America the Beautiful it's free. Still we had to wait in a line to get our free ticket, and as it was a first Saturday of spring break, the line was quite long. But it was worth a wait. 

You can walk to and from the cave, but with the kids we've decided to take an elevator. It's quite an adventure itself. The elevator was built in 1931 and it takes less than a minute to go down 750 feet (about 225 meters) underground. It's exciting for representatives of a nation which rebuilding its capital twenty something years later was able to built one escalator! It was worth going to Carlsbad only to see the elevator. But down in the caves it was just as interesting.

Cave is huge and there's paved trail. It takes about an hour to walk the whole loop. Not to interfere too much with underground ecosystem, gift shop and fast food restaurant were placed in the least nice part of the cave. On the way there are many interesting stone formations illuminated beautifully and named for example "botomless pit”. Many years ago a group of brave people decided to explore this one. After getting to the bottom - which was not really that far, they discovered ... a lot of bat guano. We know that to check how deep a pit is you only have to throw a stone, but apparently some people have to learn on their own mistakes.

After leaving the caves we went to gas station. We got full tank - the next station was over 130 miles away - and we headed towards Texas to enter New Mexico from El Paso. Gas was not the best one, plus it was up the hill most of the way and we drove against the wind - all that caused that instead of carelessly looking at changing landscape (mountains, desert, more mountains, different mountains), once in a while we just looked nervously at the computer: will we make it to the station or will we have to beg for gas…

It was so windy that our mpg was like the huge trucks have, but we made it. We'd like to thank to geological processess for making the end of our trip down the hill, otherwise we would be in trouble. Maybe they could help us at the checkpoint we passed on the way. "We'll give you all the illegal aliens from the trailer in exchange for gallon of gas"" we could shout, hoping they'll buy it. You have to remember that we were coming not only from (New) Mexico but from Roswell itself!

Checkpoint

We got to El Paso after dark. It's a city with population of 650,000 people, but from the highway it's almost invisible, what is clearly visible is Ciudad Juarez with populaiton of 1.5 million. The highway runs along the hill and turns at the angle of 90 degrees - infamous city stretches to the horizon. El Paso looks like a suburb. It wasn't a very nice adventure. The highway in town is not trailer friendly, sharp turns, dissapearing lanes…

We spent a night at Welcome Center on Texas-New Mexico state line. It was quiet and safe despite the infamous border nearby. In the morning with handful of maps, coupons and leaflets, after free coffee we headed again to New Mexico.