We got up early, had breakfast, hiked over to the RV park and drove the 17 miles to the National Park. Here is a map of the full day's ride.
We had been scheduled for a 9:30 entry but got there early and they had two vacancies on the 8:30 entry. We decided to take the elevator down (750 feet) rather than walking over a mile down to the big room. Once down there, we walked around the loop
(1.2 miles).
Here are some of the highlights from the many pictures that we took down there
To see more of our cave adventure More Cave Pictures Here
Dick brought his old hiking boots and put them on this morning to wear in the cave. All of his other shoes were back at the hotel. Just before we went in, he noticed that one of the heels was coming apart. Cue the roll of gaffers' tape. Alas, once
down in the cave, the front of that shoe came apart, also the whole bottom tread of the other shoe is somewhere 750 feet below ground. The rubber between the tread and the insole had just crumbled (the shoes may have been 30 years old). Here are
a couple of pictures. One with the tape and then after removing the tape.
We had scheduled another night in Carlsbad, but we were finished at the caves around 10:00am. We decided to move on to Santa Fe.
We had a several hour stop in Roswell. For one thing, we needed to get some more charge into the car. Weirdly, the downtown McDonalds had two Tesla destination chargers (17KW). We plugged into one of them, ate lunch, then wandered downtown to various
shops and the "International UFO Museum and Research Center".
The Research Center has a rather large library.
Plus a large set of archives.
An event in 1947 put Roswell on the map for UFOs. There were a number of interesting sets of documents displayed (we didn't photograph them all).
They had a simulated autopsy of an alien.
They also had a full size replica of "Gort", the robot from "The Day The Earth Stood Still".
We left the museum and walked through downtown back to our car. This was an interesting sign inside a shop window.
We dropped into one of the stores and Bruce bought a couple of tshirts for his grandkids.
There was a wooden alien outside the store and here are pictures of a couple of tired old guys standing next to it.
We took a country road from Roswell to Santa Fe, but it was straight and well paved. We saw very few other cars on the road.
Finally, at the end of the day, we had put in 289 miles, bringing us up to 2235. Those driving miles were in addition to several walking miles.