Happy St Patrick's Day!

I am a little behind on the blog.

Sunday we drove to Van Horn, TX and stayed at Southern Star RV Park a Passport America Park. Nice RV park with wide sites and gravel roads and pads. Also, very good WiFi. Van Horn is just a stop on the road from El Paso to Dallas or San Antonio. We rarely stop here but it was convenient for our purposes and that was to drive to Carlsbad Caverns on Monday. It is much easier to drive the 90 miles or so without the trailers.

We Monday arrived at the caverns about 11 AM, got our tickets, which were free to us old folks with the Senior Access Pass, and then decided to eat our tail gate lunch before entering the caverns. It was a good decision as it is about a 2 hour stroll through all of the Big Room. There are guided tours but we elected to do our own thing which worked out fine.

Budd, Ed, and Brenda.

 

 Tail gate lunch.

There are 2 entrances to the caves, one is a 1 ¼ mile walking trail which is all switch backs and is very steep. That is for the young and those in good shape. The rest of us take the 750 foot elevator to the bottom. It only takes a few minutes to make the descent.

The Big Room trail is about 1 ¼ miles in length and takes about 2 hours to complete at a very leisurely pace. It is hard to see just how big this room is as the trail meanders and only part of it is visible at one time.. The temperature of the cavern is 59 degrees so a light jack is recommended.

The lighting is subtle but adequate to see but it is difficult to take photos in the low light conditions. Using a flash just blows out the photo. All of the trails are paved but water does drip from the ceiling in places.

 

 

Two hours to see everything was about right and we were then ready to come back to the surface and sunlight.

Budd and I walked to the natural cave entrance and down the trail a short ways but decided it wasn't for us. Way too steep.

We got back to the RV Park about 5:15, gassed the trucks and went to the Cattle Co restaurant next door for dinner to celebrate Budd's birthday. It was just as good as we were told by someone on the internet.

This morning it started to drizzle as we got ready to leave for Las Cruces and never rained hard but I used the wipers intermittently most of the way.

We arrived at Coachlight RV Park about noon and were only able to get two sites with water and electric only as the campground was full. Twenty Five dollars for two nights at the Passport America rate. Good Enough!

After lunch we took a drive into Old Messilla which is the original town site for Las Cruces. There are some very nice well maintained adobe buildings with mostly houses and a few commercial buildings.

We looked for a Dairy Queen but couldn't find it. Yelp said it was closed so I guess they are right.