National Parks and Recreation

Looking back, I can’t believe it took us just about two years to get our 10th national park in the books. We did Acadia (and a lot of other cool traveling in the meantime), but our last new park had been two winters prior when we did our grand tour of Arizona, including the Grand Canyon.

James started a new job last year working for Boston University which meant that he would automatically get Christmas – New Year’s off every year. Since I also usually get that time off with my work, the wheel’s in my head started turning. We had been really wanting to do the Texas national parks and knew that we would have to do them in the middle of winter if we didn’t want to die from the heat. So we pulled the trigger and the planning began!

We planned to fly into Dallas because it was significantly cheaper than El Paso and I’ve always had this weird dream of driving across the entire state of Texas. So we spent a quick Christmas morning with my mother and she dropped us off at the airport. We got to Dallas around dinnertime and picked up our rental car before making an almost life or death error.

You see there was a Whataburger in the terminal with a huge line. Anxious to get on the road, we (probably I) decided that we would just get the car and grab something on the way. Remember when I said it was Christmas night? This was not an easy task. Every Whataburger was closed. Every everything was closed. We hadn’t eaten since a Dunkin’ breakfast back in Boston. We saw a promising McDonald’s with all its lights on and a line of cars at the drive-thru, but as we were about to pull in a guy jumps out of his car saying he’s the manager and it’s actually closed, they just didn’t turn the lights off. We get back on the highway and continue West, running on fumes.

Finally, James locates a Jack in the Box that should be open a little closer to Fort Worth. With fingers and toes crossed, we get off the highway and alas! The ability to buy food! I’ve never had Jack in the Box before or since, but I can say in that specific moment that it was the best food I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. Plus, we learned a very valuable lesson about travelling on Christmas, especially coming from our very Jewish neighborhood on the edge of Boston.

We continued on. It was a 7 hour trip from Dallas to our motel in Carlsbad, NM. Luckily, it included a time change, so we got there before 1am. And after the dinner fiasco, we didn’t stop once the entire trip until we first crossed into New Mexico, and that was only for gas. How is that possible when I can sometimes barely make it the two hours across Massachusetts without having to pee? Unimportant.

We settled into our tiny room and tried to get a good night’s sleep to prepare for one of our infamous, jam-packed national park trips.

I was unsure leading up to this trip what the crowds would look like around this time. Who would want to travel to nowhere West Texas during Christmas? But also it’s warmer and it’s a school vacation time. The answer ended up being that it was pretty empty the first two legs of our trip and then we hit Big Bend and there was not an ounce of free lodging anywhere. (Yay me for randomly deciding that would be the one place where I would pre-book a campground!)

I digress. We got up relatively early and made our way down to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. This is certainly not the best national park to do a picture-heavy blog post for so I’ll try to spare you too many dark, blurry photos. It was a cool park though! I definitely don’t feel the need to go back, and if we weren’t trying to hit every park I would’ve felt okay skipping it altogether, but we still had an enjoyable morning there.

The above picture is at the natural entrance to the cave where they’ve set up an amphitheater to watch the bats take flight during the summer months. They do a ranger talk leading up to the moment they all flutter out into the sky. We were there in December so we didn’t get to see this, but I did get to see the Congress Avenue bats in Austin, Texas earlier in the summer and that was truly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen!

Just look at the “tunnel” of them disappearing into the distance. It looked like the East Australian Current scene from Finding Nemo.

Okay, back to Carlsbad.

We came around the corner and all of a sudden there she was. Just a big hole in the ground. Kudos to whoever the first person was that decided, “You know what, let me grab a lantern and head down into that dark abyss.” No thanks.

But down we went. You can either take an elevator from the visitor center directly down to the main room or you can take the 1.25 mile hike through the natural entrance down. Of course, we opted for the latter.

And the hike down ended up being my favorite part. Every turn was a new formation. We wandered around and under house-sized boulders precariously propped up over our heads. And through a million different kinds of rock formations. It was really cool (literally). And all downhill!

You have to be really quiet as soon as you enter the cave because a single voice can carry over a mile down there. Fine by me!

Again, I won’t bore you with a bunch of my iPhone 6-quality photos of a very dark cave, but we finally made it to the Big Room! The main area (where the elevators let you out) to explore the cave.

There were other smaller caves where you could take ranger-guided tours, but we were short on time and figured if you’ve seen one cave, you’ve probably seen them all. So we stuck to the 1.25 mile loop around the Big Room. And we were immediately reminded that there was an elevator that got folks there easier and spent the next hour listening to screaming children echo throughout the cave while the rangers desperately tried to get everyone to be silent.

I think once I was already in the big, scary cave, I probably would’ve actually been the one to volunteer to strap in and explore the “Bottomless Pit.”

This guy was one of my favorites.

Having our fill of rocks and screaming children, we made our way to the elevators. I felt like a cheater, but we were in a time crunch and I had aspirations of doing a pretty long hike in the next park before nightfall so I figured we’d save our legs.

You don’t see that every day.

When we got back up to the Visitor’s Center I noticed this giant diorama they made to show you where you just were. This thing fascinated me to no end!

I stared at it for way too long, following our trail and seeing it from a new perspective.

See the giant boulder we walked under? So cool!

The glass tube is the elevator and the giant “hole” to its left is the Big Room we were in.

Overall, we had a great time! We definitely only needed half a day. Although, if we had more time we definitely would have explored more of the desert hikes up above the cavern and more of the surrounding area. The drive in from the highway alone was really beautiful!

But instead we grabbed lunch in the visitor’s center and said goodbye to Carlsbad Caverns and New Mexico and immediately took off for our next national park: Guadalupe Mountains in Texas.