Albuquerque to Carlsbad, New Mexico

We told the kids to say goodbye to Jean and Paul’s family when they went to bed because we planned to leave at the crack of dawn before everyone but Jean was up.  I don’t know how it went for the mice, but the best laid plans of Eric and Juliet turned into seeing Eliza off to the bus, seeing Blaise and Emma Lia off to the car, seeing Paul got off to work, and seeing if we could still fit in the car after all we’d eaten. 

Then we booked it out of Albuquerque and drove like the wind to Carlsbad, NM.  Last chance to enter the Caverns on foot is at 2 pm.  We entered its yawning mouth at 1:59. 

I haven’t given any travel advice on this blog (knowing no rational traveler would follow the advice of people who go from Portland to Montreal via Texas), but here’s some for free: Drop what you are doing and go to the Carlsbad Caverns.    

It takes about an hour to walk down to the Big Room, and it was just us four on the way there, winding down into the mouth of the cave, on under the bat-hung ceiling (we could hear sleepy chittering), and then around and ever downward along a dimly lit path past clear pools and giant boulders, glimpsing geodes and ducking through arches.  The Big Room floored me.  It’s a millennial playground for minerals and water.  Rocks do things in that Cavern that you can't imagine when you see them up top of the earth all staid and proper.  Down below us, rock flows like water down walls, builds fairylands of gnomes and trolls, swims in the air like jellyfish, illuminates the rocky sky as a chandelier.  It ripples like curtains along walls, assumes the form of a lion’s tail, curls its tendrils above the pools like the coyest anemone.  

I’ll upload some pictures, but they are the palest of reflections of the place.  I came away transformed.  It was like drinking beauty from a fire hydrant.      

-Juliet