This post is coming a little late- we've made our way to Tucson and have been settling in for our longer stay. But before we hit Tucson, we crossed New Mexico... and what an adventure it was!
From Amarillo, we took the backroads to get to Carlsbad, NM. Our original route was supposed to take us west on 40 to Albuquerque, but we needed to make up some time from our longer stay in Nashville. Since New Mexico is fairly flat, we knew we wouldn't have any problems with the back roads (unlike the back roads in West Virginia that took us over the Appalachians on a stormy night and I didn't know if we'd make it out of that drive alive, haha). Bonus: we got to drive through Roswell, NM. Lots of aliens outside of all of the businesses and we stopped on the side of the road to take some touristy pictures.
The drive was pretty windy, but nothing Pat's driving couldn't handle. About 20 minutes outside of our campground, I heard a loud rattling noise and before I could finish saying "what is that?" there was a loud crash and the kids were screaming that the awning was out. The wind had loosened the awning from its stowed position and eventually it broke loose and the wind just took it. It was scary, but we are thankful because it could have been so much worse if it broke lose completely or if we were in the left lane with a car on the right. Luckily we were alone on that section of road and no one was hurt. We had to dismantle the awning on the side of the road, competing with the wind and occasional dirt devil.
We finally made it to Carlsbad KOA. Pat and I were still a little shaken from the awning and had to clean up the rest of it (cut the fabric straight and throw out some of the screws/brackets). The kids enjoyed the playground and made some friends.
The next morning we went to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The drive in was awesome- we saw a mountain goat, herd of deer and some wild boar. We went to the visitors center to get tickets to the cave (thank you 4th Grade National Park Pass for the free admission!) and checkout the exhibits. We had to wait about a half hour for our timed entry into the cave, which was the perfect amount of time in the visitors center. We decided to use the "natural entrance" of the cave, which was a little over a mile of a walk to the "Big Room". The part of the entrance that you can see from the top is a series of switch backs that bring you down into the mouth of the cave. I assumed it leveled out at some point, but boy was I wrong! The mile walk was all switchbacks down 750ft.... the height of the Empire State Building. Thank goodness there was an elevator you could take back up!!!
After the National Park we went back to the campground for dinner and then went to a lake right around the corner to cool off.
After we left Carlsbad, we stayed 1 night at Lordsburg, NM. The campground was very very basic, but it was fine for the night just to break up the long drive to Tucson. After the kids finished school, we got back on the road and finally made it to Arizona!
We'll be in Tucson for the next 3 weeks while Pat works at University of Arizona. I'll update later about all the things we do here :-)
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