Holiday Inn Exp Stes Carlsbad

... beautifully (they employed a Broadway set designer to do so…what would the world do without New Yorkers). We’ll let the attached pics do most of the talking, except for two things not captured visually. The first is the guided tour we took through the "Kings Palace"--generally made miserable by a combination of our older-than-time tour guide and four of the loudest, largest children I’ve seen (walking ...

... YUM), a tea bar, some meat ones we ignored... And I ramble on. We were beside ourselves. Their take-out area was bigger than most small grocery stores! We got tons for a picnic dinner. We also had samples at every "bar" and section of the store. <br>- Went to the official Texas Capitol Visitor's Center for a T-shirt Christen wanted (instead of the cowboy hat). While there, we saw the original "Come and Get It" banner ...

... nada, none. Then they ask you to be silent and listen to the cave. That small action of being still had a great impact on me. You become part of the stillness, the silence. The darkness with all its unknown, takes a new form and when you embrace it, all the scary parts fade away. Bright and early tomorrow I head off for more caves - I've decided to skip Big Bend (next time) and go straight to the caves in Sonora, Texas.

... we jumped on that and soon found ourselves setting up the tent on pure gravel...I guess that's what you get if you really want electricity? The wind was atrocious as well and it took about ten boulder rocks to hold the umbrella of a tent to the ground but like always we made it work. The nice perk about staying at this camping place was that they threw in free movie rental also, and of course Basketball had to be chosen (worst movie ever). Sophie was a little hesitant ...

... back to the site, although the coolness was short-lived as not only was the temperature hot, the wind was hot too. <br><br>Back at the site we cooled down under the shade of our sun shelter and then enjoyed a nice dinner cooked outside on the camp grill. <br><br>Miles travelled: 160 <br><br>Total miles travelled: 6737 <br><br>Days on road: 55 <br><br>States visited: 11 <br><br>National Parks visited: 11

... of pictures, but without a tripod and a better working knowledge of our new digital SLR, our ability to really capture the grandness and texture of nature's sculptures was limited. Hopefully you can get a sense of some of what we saw. I had not experienced a cavern tour before, so it was pretty incredible for me. Bob has been to Loray (sp?) Caverns in Virginia and thought they were more colorful, although Carlsbad's formations were more diverse and ...

... restaurant". Turned out to be a self-service old-style cafeteria. The positives were that we could eat (and we really are trying to steer clear of fast food) and it was traditional, of a kind - chicken fried steak, collared greens, pumpkin pie, something called "white" gravy , lots of vegetales (deep fried and in batter) and some other stuff we did not even want to ask about. We ate just enough, prayed it would not ...

... and popcorn formations. After a short break in the lunch room (yes, the Carlsbad Caverns are so touristy that they now have a lunch room and gift shop in the caves themselves), we took a 1 1/2 hour ranger guided tour through the King's Palace. This allowed us to hear the typical ranger humor such as "Some of you may choose to call the columns 'pillars', but please don't because I'm from Nebraska, and a pillar is something ...

... tell our clients that "they'd enjoy the pool"! Next, we had to check out Quartzsite, AZ. For most of the year it's not much more than a wide spot in the road with a population of about 5000. But for the "winter season" (Dec to March) it becomes a Snowbird Capital and explodes to about 100,000 people, mostly in RVs!! A good portion of them actually 'dry' camp (with no hook-ups except their own generators, etc.) for free, or very little, mostly on government land. It ...