Carlsbad, New Mexico

With our truck back in tip top shape, we were ready and excited to be back on the road again.  We decided to skip going to Big Bend and head onto our next destination which was Carlsbad, New Mexico.  The Carlsbad caverns are located there so we stayed for just one night and spent the next day exploring the caverns.

This was called the touching stone, because you are not supposed to touch any of the formations inside the cave, they told us to touch this one as much as we wanted.

There were two options for entering and exiting the cave:

• 1. the natural entrance which is a steep downhill trail about a mile long and
• 2. the elevator.  I had seen amazing pictures online of the natural entrance so I really wanted to head in on this trail.  It was a lot of walking, and surprisingly hard on your legs going downhill for that amount of time.

We took some breaks along the way, but it was very cool and I am glad we did it.

This cavern was enormous!  So much bigger than the cavern we went to in Florida.  The self-guided tour around the caverns took us about 2 hours and we were pretty much done with walking after that.  Needless to say we took the elevator out of the cave.