Carlsbad Caverns

 On my last weekend in El Paso (an explanation will be forthcoming for those who have not heard) I decided that I could not be so close to  Carlsbad Cavern National Park and not see it. I downloaded the directions from google maps which said that it was 3.5 hours away. I read that there was a bat show where at dusk you sit in an amphitheater at the natural opening of the cave and half a million bats come flying out over your head. I figured that would be a once in a lifetime opportunity and made arrangements to stay at a hotel in Carlsbad so that I would not have to drive the 3.5 hours back to El Paso in the dark.

Some Taliban goats I saw while driving to the visitor center. 

Driving in the desert at night can be pretty creepy.
I asked one of the guys that lives in my apartment if he wanted to go with me but he said that he felt like he should stay home and study. I called up my adopted sister Jolene Kremin, my sister-in-law's sister, who is doing her doctoral studies in Lubbock and she consented to come along and brought a friend from her singles ward. I drove to Carlsbad and made it there in two hours, I do not know which route google maps was taking but I was not complaining that it was not really three and a half hours.

We met up at the park visitor center and bought our tickets for the cave entrance and for the guided tour we wanted to go on. We went to a presentation on the geology of the cave. We were about 2 minutes into the lecture when the fire alarm went off. We were ushered out into the parking lot where we waited in the scorching New Mexico sun for well over an hour. We finally went and sat in the car where at least we had AC and the sun was not burning our heads. After about an hour and a half the local fire department showed up and did a walk through of the visitors center after which we were allowed back in. We grabbed some lunch and then took the elevator down about a 1000 feet into the belly of the earth. The elevator dropped quickly and your ears popped several times on the way down. We got out of the elevator and and there was a huge underground lunchroom and gift shop that I took a picture of but it is hard to see.
We then went on the self guided portion of the cave which was very impressive. None of the pictures that we took of that I have seen online do the enormity of the cave justice. You could easily fit the entire conference center into one of the enormous rooms.

The formations were equally enormous and very beautiful. It was almost like being under the ocean. 

 They are still hypothesizing about how this cave was formed in the absence of running water. There was evidence of water in the cave but we only ever saw small pools here and there.

 During our guided tour of a different area called the King's Palace the ranger told us that the Bat Show was very disappointing due to the drought conditions there were very few insects and the bats were not leaving the cave. We decided that it would not be worth waiting around for several hours to see a solitary bat emerge from the cave.

Once we had explored every nook and cranny (not really the cave goes on for over thirty miles of passages) we ascended the elevator and breathed the outside air once again. I followed Jolene and her friend Karly into Carlsbad where we ate dinner at a little shabby Mexican restaurant. Our waiter was toothless and thought we needed to know ever one of his family's secrets but the food was good. I said goodbye to me fellow cave explorers and headed to my hotel. I arrived to find a broken down old motel style building with a rotten looking pool and old broken down cars or peices of cars in the parking lot.
The sign read "Executive Suites and Hotel Carlsbad, Luxury At A Fair Price" . I walked into the lobby where some very loud Indian (from India) music was blasting from behind a cluttered and crumbling front desk. After a few minutes a small Indian man came out and seemed surprised to see me standing there. Probably because I did not look like a drug addict or a prostitute. I told him that I had made on online reservation and that I was wanting to check into my room. He had to rifle through huge piles of paper on the desk to find his note pad on which he wrote my name and address. I figured he wanted it to make sending the ransom note that much easier. After a few minutes he asked how many keys I would like. He hunted around until he found some very used looking card keys and an even more used envelope and placed them inside it. He wrote the number to my room on the envelope and showed me on a stained wrinkled map where to find it. I drove my car around the building half expecting to see limbs poking out of the dumpster that stood in front of my room. There was an old construction worker leaning up against his truck with a blank expression on his face and a pile of old drywall sitting in the open door of a nearby room. I tried my key in the door and nothing happened. I tried it again and nothing. Another small Indian man came around the corner and asked me what was wrong. He came over and took my key from me gave his fingers a good lick and ran my magnetic key strip through his saliva sodden fingers and then stuck it in the door and ripped it out as fast as he possibly could. The light winked green and the door opened. I thanked him for his help and he bustled off. I walked into the room and immediately thought "you gotta be kidding me". The room stank of old tobacco smoke and mildew. There was obvious water damage on the walls complete with brown discoloration and large strips where the mud and tape had peeled off the seams. I felt things crawling on me whether real or imagined I do not know. I went into the bathroom where the molding around the door was rotted and the paint was peeled and flaking. It did not take more than a few minutes for me to decide that I was not going to stay there. I walked out of the room and back out to my car. The old construction worker was in the same position with the same expression on his face. I wondered briefly if he was dead but then noticed that the cigarette hanging from his lips was glowing so he was at least able to suck in air. Back at the front desk, a new Indian man greeted me. I handed him my keys and told him that I could not stay. He winked and acted like staying for fifteen minutes in one of their rooms was a normal occurrence. I shuddered and left as quickly as I could. I drove home and slept in my own bed in my own apartment. Driving home was much less creepy than it would have been to sleep in that room and at least when I woke up this morning I did not have any new diseases or parasites. Live and learn, I told Cami that I did not waste the money because I would have paid $60 not to have to sleep in that room. She did not really see it that way.