Spent the day before driving from Phoenix to Superior to take Ruby and Axel through the town U-Turn with Sean Penn was filmed after watching it with them. From there, we continued on the scenic route eschewing Interstate 10 as we headed to Globe and Safford before entering New Mexico near Mule Creek. Down through Silver City, we traveled south to Deming, where the I-10 was unavoidable until we were able to merge on the US 180 outside of El Paso, Texas. We arrived a bit late at the Best Western in Carlsbad, so maybe driving 598 miles of scenic route wasn’t the best idea, but we were adamant that we’d avoid major freeways, so we accomplished that to the best of our ability.

Yes, Axel and I are reaching out for the giant nipple.

Early in the morning, we arrived at Carlsbad Caverns National Park and sadly took the elevator in as we didn’t appreciate yet what the natural entrance had to offer as this was our first visit, and we had reservations to visit the Left-Hand Tunnel at 9:00 and didn’t want to be late. These photos were taken in the Big Room if I’m not mistaken. While you can’t see it in this photo, Caroline is wearing cords, and it wasn’t even the ’70s anymore.

In the afternoon, we had reservations to visit the King’s Palace in the cavern, and from there, we needed to get going for Roswell where we were spending the night. This is our friend Ruby Rieke. As for our impressions of the caverns here in the southeast corner of New Mexico, we were so enthusiastically impressed that we would return many more times after this.