Texas or Bust!

Our hotel in Carlsbad was as close to a “Nimon Special” as you can get. There was termite markings in the closet, I woke up to an unknown bug crawling on my arm in the night, general uncleanliness and a very dirty-desert exterior. And breakfast was sub-par especially because we were particularly hungry after having no dinner. But we ate what we could and headed out on our next day's adventure.
Our first stop, Carlsbad Cavern National Park. We spoke to the rangers to get the low down on what to do. They showed us where we buy tickets to go into the Caverns and that there is an elevator that takes your 750 feet under ground. Since we were limited on time we decided to skip walking down the 1 mile trail from the natural entrance down to the Big Room and hopped on the elevator. We were pretty sure we were the first people down today as the ranger took just Callie and I down and we saw no one else in the caverns when we started. The first stop was the Cave Bathrooms (Sounds silly, but pure awesomeness)! Then we entered the caverns. We spent the majority of the time with our mouths open staring wide eyed at the wonders above, below and around us. There are no words to describe something you MUST experience yourself. (We brought Trigger with us, but he was too scared of the dark to get out of the backpack... in other words we forgot about him in our distraction of the cavern). And it was really hard to take good pictures in the dark of the cave. But here are a few of the good ones:





After the wonders of the caverns we headed on the road towards our ultimate destination. The GPS took us along a back road short cut where we crossed 7 or 8 cattle guards, a group of cows, through the boondocks of New Mexico and then finally out to Hwy 285. Where we drove down into Texas and to the I-10.(We discovered that Texas is another hours difference than CA so we changed our clocks again.)


"Everything's bigger in Texas" says Trigger

Trigger was very happy to be back in his home state.
Along the Freeway we found the speed limit to be 80 mph!!! Our transitioned us to a Texas we didn't know existed, the green forest, hilly Texas. It was a beautiful view for most of the way into San Antonio. And the travels went without incident, Yippee!
When we finally we entered the San Antonio city limits our excitement was palpable. We found our hotel and check in. In our room we found a lovely space that was cool and inviting. And out our back door is a patio that opens up right over the Riverwalk.

We got a restaurant recommendation by our hotel person to a place right next door, on the Riverwalk call Acenar Modern Tex-Mex which was a great introduction to Texas food. It was delicious, with good food, good drinks and a great Tres Leches Cake – Yum!
Tomorrow is promising to be a great day with a tour of the Missions and The Alamo already scheduled. Stay tuned tomorrow for our next post!