Cross Country Chronicle: Between the Caverns and Santa Fe

Sunday, February 17

(note: I have made it safely to my destination at this point, for anyone that may be confused. I clearly fell behind on posts--I will continue to post until I cover what I've missed, so the posts will cover what I did in chronological order even though I've already arrived! Thanks for reading!)

Though completely different from the marvel that lies underground in the Carlsbad Caverns, the view from atop the mountain is quite impressive. We stopped at a pull-off spot on the way back to town to enjoy the landscape. One thing that stuck me was that we were so high up looking and many different levels of land expanded in front of us, yet just outside the national park everything was flat for miles and miles and miles.

These pictures really can't even translate how awesome and impressive the landscape is.

After leaving the Caverns and getting some much-needed lunch, we ditched Carlsbad, NM for Santa Fe! This time we got to drive through New Mexico in the daytime. At night, it had felt somewhat creepy driving though the empty, flat land in the dark. During the day it wasn't so much creepy as surprising. We still seemed to be on the only road around for most of the drive, with nothing to very little around. We would see signs pointing to towns that seemed to consist of about four buildings. Another thing we noticed was tons of trash that perhaps blew across the desert until it finally hit a fence. We even saw a huge pile of trash labeled as a "dump site", which was bizarre--but not as bizarre as the city of Roswell! If you don't know anything about Roswell, NM and its famed UFO incident, you can read a bit about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident . Roswell was more built-up than most of what we were driving through, but it wasn't any big city I'm used to. We passed by their famed UFO museum but that was far from being the only UFO reference visible on a quick drive through. There were statues of aliens everywhere--at gas stations, hotels, parking lots, etc. Roswell was a strange combination of tourist attractions (I use that term somewhat loosely, mainly thinking of the UFO museum and hotels), aliens, military, and hipsters. We were somewhat surprised to stumble upon a hipster population at a Starbucks we stopped in, though after thinking a bit it seemed to make sense.