Day 17 – Guadalupe Mountain National Park, TX to Carlsbad, NM (38 miles)

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Today was a short day. I think that was good for everyone’s sanity.

The day started out incredibly cold and a bit frustrating. For our bikes’ safety, they are all locked together overnight while we are camping or if the bikes can’t be kept indoors. The bikes were safely locked last night; however, this morning, we could not open one of the locks. None of the keys we had would open the lock. This was bad. Very bad. Luckily, we were staying in a camping ground with lots of handy campers. Someone just happened to have both wire cutters and a hacksaw in their car. So after lots of elbow grease, we were able to cut through the cord holding our bikes together.We could not, however, open the lock. So we lost one of our bike cables. Sad loss. Those things are not cheap…

The first 7 miles of the trip were downhill. This was great. But then the rolling hills started again. And the wind continued as fiercely as yesterday. We just can’t seem to escape the wind. It was literally impossible to simply coast down the hills, because the wind would stop us in our tracks. Bitch. It started drizzling toward the end of the ride, but, luckily, we were all able to get in before the rain really started.

We ended our ride right outside of Carlsbad Caverns. Adam entertained all of us by dumping our entire box of kitchen stuff out the door of the cargo van. After cleaning up this mess, we all got some hot chocolate or coffee at a little “grocery store,” where we were able to warm up and escape from the rain and the wind. I never imagined I would be drinking hot chocolate in Texas. But it was cold.

The tour around Carlsbad Caverns was impressive. The caverns are enormous. I felt like Carmen Sandiego spelunking around the caverns. They are located 754 feet below the surface. The temperature is always 56 degrees, with 90% humidity. On the way in to the cave, there were lots of bats circling the entrance. Kind-of creepy, but also pretty neat. We saw lots of stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, draperies, columns, and popcorn. Yes, popcorn. But not the type you can eat. That would have been awesome.

This is a picture of Adam, me, Tim, and Chris pretending to be stalactites, stalagmites, and popcorn.
Around mid-afternoon, we arrived at site for the evening. We are staying at a Baptist church in Carlsbad, NM. There is a bird that lives in the gym ceiling. It chirps “hello” every once in a while. We had a dinner of grilled cheese and burned tomato soup. I didn’t know it was possible to burn tomato soup, but it definitely is. That’s ok, it was still pretty good. We just had to add a lot of extra stuff to get rid of the burnt flavor…

End of the seventeenth day. And it was spelunk-tastic.