This year for our early June summer trip, we drove to Carlsbad, New Mexico, with Carlsbad Caverns being our primary destination. For the most part, the vacation went off without a hitch.

Catch-up

Because I haven’t posted since March, some catch-up is in order. Our children finished the school year — their second full school year of the Covid-19 pandemic — both finishing with very good grades (the boy had all As). M bought some Le Creuset cooking gear and has already pleased our palettes many times with a plethora of new recipes. I’ve continued to study chess (while knocking around my sci-fi novel in my head as I fall asleep each night). My chess channel on YouTube now has over 200 subscribers — a milestone I passed while we were in New Mexico.

In late May, we attempted to visit my brother in the DFW area for a birthday party, but I-35 traffic came to a standstill and we sat in our car for 90 minutes. By the time traffic began moving again, we had missed the event we had set out for. We turned around and came home.

As usual, B had a birthday just as our vacation began — this time two days before we left.

The Trip West (Day One)

We left home at 08:48 on Monday (June 13), and got on I-14 (remember, Killeen has an interstate now!), heading west. M drove until San Saba, our first rest stop. I took over and we stayed on US190 (which is what I-14 reverts to west of Killeen) until Brady, TX, where we turned onto US87, heading northwest. We lunched in San Angelo (Burger King) and then drove on, switching to TX176 near Big Spring.

The next stretch was horrible. If you look at Google Maps (turn on Satellite view) and follow 176 west of Big Spring, you’ll see a bunch of brown patches — those are fields of bare dirt, which look like they might have grown crops at one time; some of the rows of dead crops are still visible above the bare dirt. And you’ll see a bunch of white spots (they get thicker as you move westward past Tarzan, TX) — those are oilfield pumping units. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Driving the stretch, you also see dozens of processing facilities, pipeline facilities, and you’ll be the only one not in an 18-wheeler or oilfield work truck of some kind.

It was also windy, so that bare dirt was turning to sand and blowing across the road. In a few places, it actually covered the road in strips, and visibility was reduced to a couple hundred yards. Occasionally, we saw a house, but all of them seem to have been abandoned. All of it reminded me of a book I got in the early 1980s, called “Future Cities”, which had two artist-conception renderings of what the future could be like, side by side. One was a bright and clean world in which people, companies, and governments had collectively decided to stop ruining the planet; the other was a gritty, dirty, future with dead and struggling vegetation and petrol-burning vehicles belching out more fumes. “It’s up to us!” was the message of that page in the book. Driving through Tarzan and the surrounding areas, it’s clear which future we chose. (Not the good one.) It was a mix of that book’s drawing and something from Mad Max. Words like “hellscape” came to mind.

There was nowhere to stop for a couple of hours, nor would we have wanted to — I doubt we would have been able to breathe if we stepped outside. The air had mostly cleared by the time we arrived at Andrews, TX, at 15:11. After filling up with gas (yes, I do see the delicious irony) for $4.499 per gallon, we continued west, crossing the state line near Eunice, New Mexico (try not to look at the Google satellite images of this area either; it’s depressing). NM176 got us as far as [a place that isn’t named], where we switched to US62 for the last stretch into Carlsbad, N.M.

We arrived at our Comfort Inn at 17:32 (16:32 Mountain time) — so the whole trip was about eight hours and 44 minutes, all told.

The hotel was nice, though not quite as roomy as we’ve grown accustomed to (M and I have admittedly spoiled ourselves the last few years with nice suites), but larger than the room we shared in Killeen during the 2021 ice storm and power outage. For once, there were plenty of towels and a large ventilator in the bathroom. The beds were incredibly comfortable. Interestingly, there were only two towel hooks (we keep forgetting to buy and bring our own — I keep thinking hotels will finally realize towel hooks come in handy). Weirdly, the TV faced a half-wall, not quite far enough right for the beds and not quite far enough left for the sofa. The lobby was small but gorgeous, and breakfasts there were filling and delicious. There was also free popcorn in the afternoons, and the coffee machine was available all day (instead of only in the mornings like some other hotels).

We dined at Denny’s that evening — only one server and one cook, but they managed to treat a surprising number of guests without much wait time. We ignored the flies, as we had already learned earlier in the day that the flies are everywhere; at least two had sneaked into our minivan at Andrews, Texas, and rode with us to Carlsbad. (If you’ve ever heard Ray Stevens’ “The Flies Of Texas Are Upon You”, let it be known that some of them have migrated to New Mexico.) The kids enjoyed the hotel’s pool after supper.

 

Carlsbad Caverns (Day Two)

We chose Carlsbad Caverns as our trip’s main destination because it seemed like one of those “Americana” things — one of the fantastic natural formations like the Grand Canyon about which you can always say: “Yep, I’ve been there.” M and I went in July 2010, as part of a longer trip that included Odessa, Texas, and seeing some of her cousins there (and a meet-up with a Flickr friend!). That time, gas was $2.559 per gallon and we made it a six-day trip. M was pregnant with R and our house was still being built. During that trip, we agreed that the cavern would be something to take our children to someday, when they were old enough to remember it. This was that “someday”.

We had reserved a spot in the cavern (national park) previously, online, and arrived on site with several minutes to spare. Children are free (yay!) and buying our tickets was quick and easy. One thing has changed. Tours aren’t guided now; you just get a talking-to from a park ranger and then head down the long and winding ramp into the cave. In some ways, it made it less interesting — I often enjoy the tour guide speeches. But with children, I think it was better to just walk down, with M and I telling the children things we remember from previous tours of our own. RnB weren’t quite as impressed as I’d hoped — they’ve been to Natural Bridge Caverns twice and Inner Space Cavern during the pandemic — but they were well-behaved enough. Without the requirement of walking with a tour group, each family or person went at their own pace — this meant we four were alone much of the time in the cave, which was an interesting experiment. I quite liked it.

I don’t think any of us were really tired when we got to the bottom, but we decided to skip the “Big Room” — we all agreed that it looked exactly like more of the cave we’d been seeing for the past hour or more. So we (eventually) found the elevator at the bottom and rode it to the top.

We each bought something at the gift shop — water bottle for M, coffee mug for me, and plush bat toys for RnB — and then returned to town for lunch. (Note: I remembered the drive from Carlsbad to the cavern being longer last time; this time it didn’t feel long at all.) On the way back into town, I drove through the parking lot of the hotel M and I stayed at in 2010 (the Great Western Inn) — which looks pretty run-down. We ate at Wendy’s in downtown Carlsbad, which reminds me: there is only one road (US62) that goes all the way through the city, as far as we could tell. Our hotel was on the northwest edge of town next to Carlsbad Medical Center, and the caverns are southwest of town, which means driving east and south into the city, and then south and west out of the city to get to the cave, and the reverse to get back. The surrounding area appears to be mostly empty, with no alternate routes available.

In the afternoon, we had intended to enjoy the “Lake Carlsbad Recreation Area”, which is really just a stretch of the Pecos River near downtown. In 2010, M and I had rented a paddle boat (which is apparently called a pedalo in the foreign language known as “British”) and also taken a riverboat tour up and down the Pecos. This time, we arrived to find the paddle boats exactly as expected, and the same booth as before where we rented them, but no one occupying the rental booth. Two kind gentlemen lunching nearby told us that the staffing of the rental booth is “pretty inconsistent”, sometimes only one day a week, and never a guarantee as to which day. There was no tour boat. So we returned to the hotel.

(Honestly, I was kind of relieved. When M and I rode the paddle boat in 2010, it was evening. This time, it was early afternoon and over 100°F.)

So M took the children to the hotel’s pool for a couple of hours while I drove around town. I bought a bicycle tire pump at a “Big 5 Sporting Goods” (never heard of it before) — because a few weeks earlier when I’d bought a new tube for my bike tire, it had a non-standard valve that my current pump won’t inflate. And I bought a few things I needed anyway at Harbor Freight (there is a Harbor Freight in Killeen, though I’ve never been inside).

For supper, the children wanted Denny’s again, which we vetoed. We looked at some locally owned restaurants online, but they seemed either (1) incredibly expensive, (2) without a kids’ menu, or (3) kinda sketchy. (In a couple of cases, all three.) So we decided on Chili’s, but after driving the length of the city on US62, we found Chili’s jam-packed with a half-hour wait and 72% of the vehicles in the parking lot sported rabid hard-right wing bumper stickers. (To be fair, it wasn’t just Chili’s — the entire town seemed to be rabidly pro-Trump, more than I would have believed possible. Not that I asked anyone about it, but the sheer number of flags, bumper stickers, window signs, and T-shirts sent us a message that we received loud and clear.) So we drove back through town to try one of the sketchy-looking local restaurants, but when we got there, there was no place to park. (Not that it was full; there just wasn’t a place to park. I guess people walk to it? Or get dropped off?) So we went to A&W, which our children have never eaten at, but it appeared shut down. On closer inspection, it was drive-thru only. We went to Arby’s, but it also had a closed dining room.

We ended up at Blake’s Lotaburger, which I later learned is a New Mexico-only chain (not counting three locations in Tuscon). The chain previously won USA Today’s 2016 prize for “Best Green Chile Cheeseburger In New Mexico” (source), and according to the city website for Gallup, N.M., the chain was once honored by National Geographic for “The World’s Best Green Chile Cheeseburger” (source). None of us tried the green chile cheeseburger, which doesn’t sound appetizing at all to me, but the burgers we did have were decent, the staff friendly, and it was the one place we’d tried so far that wasn’t filled with flies.

After supper, all of us went to the pool for a little bit.

The Trip Home (Day Three)

We planned for a short trip, not only to cut down on hotel and food costs, but because we all seem to be happier with short trips. On the morning of Wednesday, June 15, we filled up with gas at an “Alon” station (they are all over N.M. and west Texas) and headed out at about 08:00 (Mountain time), taking the exact same route we’d come in on. (We did explore the idea of alternate routes, but this one worked pretty well and we were trying to avoid Midland/Odessa, which had lost all city water around that time.)

We made it to Andrews, TX, within two hours, stopping at the same station as before for our bathroom break, and pulled into San Angelo, TX, two hours and twenty minutes after that, eating lunch at Whataburger — which was the best Whataburger we’ve ever been inside, in terms of speedy, accurate service. Another two hours of driving got us to San Saba, where I asked M to take over driving, and we arrived home eight hours and 45 minutes after leaving. (Both ways were about 450 miles and took about the same amount of time.) It was nice to see trees and green vegetation again.

It’s not a drive we’d want to do again — we only wanted to take the children to Carlsbad Caverns once, to say we did it.

I imagine that someday, we’ll make a similar trip to the Grand Canyon, so RnB can say they’ve been there, but only time will tell.