Day 7 - Carlsbad - New Mexico

Sunday and another chance to get out and see what this place has to offer.  This time it was a small town called Carlsbad and in particular Carlsbad Caverns.  I had been told they were well worth a visit and they were not wrong.  About a hundred or so miles from Hobbs meant that the journey was much less than yesterday and arriving at the National Park I was impressed once again by the amenities.  Plenty of information about the place, staff to talk to, free parking and free restrooms all over the place.
I had arrived after a pretty early start, on my own as my colleague had decided to stay put in the hotel for the day, at 11:30 and had soon payed ten dollars for the privilege of taking an elevator ride down the 750 feet to the start of the self tour guide.  There is a guided tour and where you can do a lot more than just walk around, some of the tours are into some quite tight caverns and require crawling around in tiny spaces for quite a bit, but these were all booked up, shame really.  So I took the one and a half mile option through the caverns.
Firstly the place I went to was vast, we are talking a hundred plus feet to the room and some of the pits were over a hundred foot down.  One cavern, the Big Room, aptly named is the size of fourteen football fields so you get the feel for how big.  To study and look at the amazing columns and stalagmites and tites it took me over three hours to walk around.  There are some points you have to just stand and stare to understand the magnitude of scale.  I have taken plenty of photo's and will attach a few to the blog.
I was surprised but the self guided tour was not busy and with it being Mothers day I did assume some husbands might fancy their wives and kids being under 750 feet of earth for the day.
After I had emerged back to the surface the heat hit me again, down in the cavern it had been quite cool but very humid, I suppose with all the dripping water but back at the top it was in the nineties again and with a cooling breeze it seemed to me a very pleasant mid eighties.
Whilst at the visitor centre I took a look at the brochures for other attractions and one was for the Living Desert Wildlife Park which is about 30 miles from the caverns and to the North West of the town.
The purpose of the park is to show life in the Chihuahuan Desert.  Firstly I will say that the park is very good, informative, it looks well run, the animals look very clean.  The only problem is that I don't agree with parks that keep animals in cages.  To be fair the animals that are on display do seem to have a lot of space and the Bison,Elk etc have got quite large fields and look perfectly at home.  However they have a bear in the collection which I am not sure is a native of this desert and watching the bear in its home just made me feel so bad, and really this spoilt it for me.  Also there were birds which did have space to fly but as there was the same type of birds flying around the park naturally i would have been happier if they would have given information about the birds and then a few pictures saying look up and you will most likely see the bird. Another good aspect to the park is the plant life, they have a good range of plants from the desert and there is a lot of information which is interestingly laid out.  Overall the park is very good and for people who are not as faddy as me then it is worth a visit but for me I would not go again and came away feeling quite sad for the animals trapped in cages and not living out the life they were meant for.  I know people may think I am pathetic but I suppose we are all built differently.
From the park I made my way through Carlsbad and as it was getting late in the afternoon it was a bit too late to visit the mall which I found.  So I headed back toward Hobbs. I was driving along the road when i saw a brown sign pointing out a lake and I thought on the spur of the moment it was a good place to look at so I checked and nothing around so I crossed the lanes and turned left and down the small road.  I traveled along the road for some time but did not find another sign so eventually turned around and returned to the main road.  With no other places to go I was back at the hotel by just after 18:00 and a chance to have a rest and maybe an earlier night as tomorrow I have my drug test and safety training which is set to start at 06:00 which means I need to leave the hotel by just after 05:00 to make sure I am there on time.  A little early and not sure why they start so early but it has to be done.

So that is all for now and will give a

Night all
A couple of videos from the Carlsbad Caverns.
http://youtu.be/-8X2XXUOoYw

http://youtu.be/kPZ_ZckxzuM

A selection of photos from the caverns today.  Not sure they really give off the awesomeness of the things I have seen.  Perhaps I am just a crap photographer.