Day 11 (Monday, July 5th) Driving to Carlsbad Caverns, NM

Today, we drove from San Antonio, Texas to a tiny campground at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. The guys were fascinated by the alien landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert, which is one of the wettest and most diverse desert ecologies in the world. The Chihuahuan Desert, although teeming with life is a much more arid area than San Antonio. The further west we drove, the dryer it became. We saw fewer trees and grass and began to see oil wells and some cactus. Most of the oil wells were still pumping and we had to explain what they were to the boys.

Just as we got them to understand oil wells, we ran into the largest wind farm we've ever heard of. Our best guess is that there were well over 1,000 gigantic wind turbines stretched over about 20-30 miles of the desert. They were all spinning so we had a wonderful conversation about renewable energy sources. It was inspiring to see these things making electricity out in the middle of the desert.

We arrived at our campground by the late afternoon so we had time to set up, have dinner and drive up into Carlsbad Caverns National Park to explore. We got there before the bats had left the cave for the evening so we found seats in the amphitheater and waited for the bats to emerge. We found out that the bats are sensitive to all electronic emissions so we had to turn off our phones and cameras. We don't have any pictures of the bats coming out, just our memories, but we did take a picture of the amphitheater at the natural entrance to the caverns. We will return tomorrow to walk down into the caverns from this entrance. There is also an elevator that takes you down 750 ft. in one minute but for our first entry into the cavern, we'll take the natural walking route.