Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

We left Albuquerque and drove south for two of the national parks that we have on our list: Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. Carlsbad Caverns is almost on the Mexican border in the east-ish side of the state. It also happens to be within driving distance of Roswell. We figured this would likely be one of few opportunities in life to pop in to the UFO capital of the US so we decided to make it our home base for a couple of nights.

Roswell takes their alien history seriously, everywhere you look are alien signs, figures, billboards and paraphernalia. Even the lamp posts have alien eyes painted on them. The McDonalds play place is shaped like a space ship. They put Cavendish’s obsession with Anne to shame. We spent our first afternoon hanging out at the International UFO Museum and Research Center. The kids enjoyed it, although, Madeline did ask after a while if we were actually going to get to see any real aliens.

One day of aliens seemed to be more than enough for our crew and so we headed even further south, from the middle of nowhere to the edge of nowhere to visit Carlsbad Caverns. This is a huge underground cave system that you can tour around. You descend into the caves by walking at a 20% grade for 80 storeys. It was a wildly windy day when we visited the caves so getting to the entrance was pretty breezy, thankfully the cave system has really stable weather.

You have the option to take an elevator one or both of the ways into the cave. We opted to walk in and get taken back to the top. 20% grade downhill seems like enough of a workout to me. We definitely met some people on the way in that had made the wrong choice. At the end of the descent we could have done a different loop of the cave system, but we felt like we had seen enough stalagmites and stalactites for the day and headed out.