Day 16 - Carlsbad, New Mexico to Fort Stockton, Texas

I have to tell you that southern New Mexico and northwestern Texas has not been our friend so far. Oh, it's not the people, they're perfectly charming. It's the damn oil boom. Who knew there was an oil boom going on? Everywhere you look there's nothing but a sea of dusty white trucks full of oil rig equipment, 18-wheelers in long convoys coming at you in endless processions, and RV parks full of, more or less, permanent residents. You can tell they're permanent because their rigs look like they haven't moved in months, if not years. Some of them have become so sedentary that their owners have fashioned decks and patios and dog runs on their tiny patch of ground. There's even ATVs and dirt bikes parked in every nook and cranny. Come night fall, one by one, each and every RV (usually a fifth wheel trailer) will accumulate one of the aforementioned white pickups covered with a layer of mocha-colored dust, attesting to the fact that each semi-permanent resident is not only employed, but most like doing oil work out in the wilds of the Texas plains.

Last night, you may remember, my truncated blog entry bore some of the feelings that I was experiencing trying to upload my material to the web. Unfortunately, though my laptop showed a "connected" message, seldom was any traffic from my computer allowed. Today, when we checked into the officially-sanctioned Good Sam park in Fort Stockton, Texas, I was quick to ask the young lady holding my credit card if I was going to experience good WiFi reception in the Fort Stockton park. Gleefully, she told me, more or less, "in your dreams." It turns out that all of these oil field workers who have taken up all the park spaces for months at a time think it's within their rights to stream videos from the web on their big screen TVs and the throughput in the RV park has dwindled to a trickle or worse.

Sigh! What has this world come to? I'm sure I don't know. Anyway, out of desperation I finally got around to finding out why my mobile uplink device insists on dialing an out-of-work waitress in southern Idaho. She even called me back while we were in Phoenix to find out why I was bothering her during her favorite soaps. Anyway, story short, I called the company to find out why they have done me wrong and talked to a young lady whose English is coming along quite nicely. She informed me that since I didn't use my uplink device in the last three months they had turned off the account. But, I protested, I only use this device in the motor home. Isn't it somewhat moronic to turn it off because it doesn't get used all the time. There was a long silence on her end, then she proceeded to reiterate the company policy to me in case I hadn't understood.

Anyway, long story even shorter, she was able to inform me that if I only rebooted eleven times, re-insert the uplink device another half dozen, all my troubles would go away. Making sure that I had obtained the necessary ID info from the young lady, I asked if I could try trouble shooting it myself and I'd call her back if I needed her. So, shortest version, I reinstalled the software, updated the new ID info, and I was in business. It's pretty sad when a supposed IT professional tries to bullshit an IT professional, however I'm glad I didn't let on how hopeless I thought she was.

I've been wanting to visit the Carlsbad Caverns all my life, or at least since I was twelve years old or so. Today, only fifty odd years later, I got my wish. The National Parks people were quite gracious and let Concetta and me in the front door for zero dollars owing to our National Park Pass for oldsters that we presented. We did spring for the five bucks apiece for the audio tour gizmo. The little device really worked great even though it was more than 750 feet below street level in the deepest part of the cave we visited. I'm not sure if we were allowed to take flash photos, though it seemed the ranger person said no. So I tried doing available light photography, which was a BIG challenge since there wasn't much of that precious light around. But even after I erased about two dozen blurry photos that reminded me of something one might shoot from a moving bus, I still ended up with a few decent ones.

Concetta and I walked the better part of the morning down a long series of switchbacks, some steeper than others, but all done in rough-coated concrete to prevent slipping and all accompanied by great hand railings. It was the absolute epitome of comfort, though it helped that we had worn our hiking boots as many of the passages were fairly steep. The part of the tour that just boggled our minds was when they told us that the caverns had once, some 200 million years ago, been part of an aquatic reef resting just beneath the surface of an inland sea. This caused, over time, hundreds of feet of limestone to be laid down as ancient reef creatures died and sank to the bottom. It's hard to imagine over 700 feet of limestone sea creature remnants, but that's what we saw. You really get some idea of the passage of time down there in the bowels of the earth, especially when you see these huge stalagmites and stalactites that have grown ONE drip at a time over tens of thousands of years. You can't help but appreciate the magnificent ancientness of our planet.

Accessing the caverns is very, very easy as the roads are great and there is ample room to park your motor home or trailer quite removed from the regular car parking. And, you can take a number of different length hikes to your liking, as well as sign on for ranger-led hikes to parts of the cave not accessible without the guy in the green suit by your side.

After eating lunch in the parking lot overlooking the dusty Texan plains, we set out once more to see what adventures we might find. We retraced our steps back north nearly to the town of Carlsbad, then angled off on route 285 that wore away towards the southeastern border of New Mexico. This part of our country sort of disappointed me. I don't know whether it's the aforementioned oil boom going on, or whether these folks haven't watched the anti littering commercials for the past sixty-five years or so, but Route 285 was festooned with more tons of litter per lineal mile than I have seen since I last visited the Carson City landfill. I mean there was just a bewildering amount of the stuff. Still, we were busy listening to a half dozen Agatha Cristie short mysteries on the disk player and just tried to focus on that.

One thing that has noticeably improved since we ambled into the great state of Texas is the temperature. Though I had not expected to encounter much in the way of freezing temperatures when we left Carson City and headed south, quite the opposite has been true. At the Grand Canyon it got down to the high twenties at night and we weren't allowed to keep our water supply lines hooked up over night. A couple of nights ago in Holbrook, New Mexico, there was ice on the side of the RV when I went out to coil up the supply line. But today, it really felt like we had encountered summer. We even had to throw open all the windows and rooftop vents as soon as we set up in Fort Stockton this afternoon.

Well, I don't want to use up all the minutes on my uplink device in one night so I'll say, adios amigos. Keep on traveling!