We left Junction, Texas on April 25 and drove for about 6.5 hours to Brantley Lake State Park, just north of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Once you get out of the Texas hill country there’s not much to see but miles and miles and miles of scrubby desert. It’s a pretty boring drive.
Remember how I said that the truck AC fix was going to be worth every penny...oh yeah, it is. We’d be baked, cooked, fried, melted, dead, without it. When we started the drive at 9 am it was 72F, when we got to the campground in New Mexico, it was 106F. Hottest day yet!!!
Pics from the long hot drive and Brantley Lake State Park
The dry heat is something to experience, hard to explain how oppressive it is and there’s no where to get out of it except your air conditioned trailer or truck. Or you can go underground. So that’s exactly what we did, at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Spent a few hours walking around the most impressive caves we’ve ever been in. The sheer size of the cave system is something you have to experience. Some of the rooms in it are huge. We did the self guided tour and it took us about 2.5 hours to walk around. There’s so much to look at, and it’s mind boggling to think just how long it took to create all the formations. Truly one of the wonders of the world, especially considering where it’s located.
That was really the only thing we wanted to see here but since we were this close to Roswell, we did a day trip there. We were expecting it to be a pretty campy place, kinda like the Niagara Falls strip based on all the alien hype the place gets but it’s not. In fact you see very little of it when you drive down main street. We could have spent $5/each to go thru the Alien Museum full of fake stuff but decided to put the money towards a good lunch instead. We did go to the Roswell Art and history museum though. It was free, air conditioned and actually quite interesting. Not our normal thing to do but hey, why not?
Still making our way north and west towards the Grand Canyon. Albuquerque, New Mexico is our next stop.