USA Road Trip: New Mexico

Jul 24

Written By

After driving all night, we greet the morning in oil country. This was truly a beautiful drive from Texas into New Mexico, now don't get me wrong, there was nothing here, but it was beautiful and I loved seeing people working the oil rigs as the sun was coming up. I saw how hard people work out here in the desert and it really is like a movie or what you think of as America's roots, where the men wake up early to work the land, then go sit around on front porches. As we crossed into New Mexico, we went through tiny little towns and I was immensely aware that these towns were fighting to survive, but their resilience was evident. I loved the hand painted signs, local stores and hard workers. Our trip of tears through Texas immediately took on a new, beautiful outlook as New Mexico greeted us with its grand, natural wonders.

We got into Carlsbad, New Mexico around 8am and couldn't check into our campsite for quite a while, so we decided that hey, 3 days no shower, no big deal! Right? We ate breakfast at Ihop, as a small reward to ourselves for making it through Texas alive and began our day. We headed out to Carlsbad Caverns.

For 6$ a person, we boarded an elevator that took us down 750 feet below ground. We emerged into the dark, cold caverns and were immediately blown away. There are over 110 miles of just one passageway and there are over 300 known caves down there so far! This was probably the coolest thing we did on our entire trip. We kept talking about how we felt like Indiana Jones exploring the caves. These pictures cannot even begin to let you in on the wonder and majestic-ness of the caves. God is such a sneaky little artist putting these down here for us to find, like a scavenger hunt. He's a fun guy.

Mini science lesson: these stalactites are limestone and were formed through dripping water.

It is completely dark down here, so there are fancy lighting systems in place so the lights dont hurt the rock.

Unfortunately for me though, my camera was revolting and refused to take pictures down here. We fought, I lost. I got a few good shots, but do any smart people out there have any underground cave photo tips?

Close up of one of the formations, kinda gross looking.

These were my favorite, they reminded me of an ice castle with icicles dripping from the roof.

After we left the caves we headed over to Sitting Bull Falls, we thought it was a natural hot spring, but wasnt. But it was a pretty awesome waterfall that you could swim in!

We had a lot of fun here, but we couldnt swim because there had been a wildfire over easter and the ashes made the water really gross and thick. But we enjoyed playing on the rocks and laying out in the sun.

This gem was very secluded and only a few people were here, but the best part was the drive to Sitting Bull. We drove on an unmarked county road for almost an hour to get here, all we saw were cows and views like this:

All of New Mexico looked like this, it was phenomenal! Needless to say we took lots of pictures!

Then we headed in to take a shower for the first time in days. We stayed at this adorable KOA campground that was decorated super cute!

Oh yeah, but they charged us 37$ to camp here. Fail. After not showering and sleeping in our car 2 nights in a row, we would have paid almost anything though. We enjoyed our evening here and packed up the next morning and drove the short 2 hours to White Sands National Monument. This cost about 6$ per person and was totally worth it! The sand was so white (hence the name) but was completely different from beach sand because it was gypsum, which is a rock that the wind had smoothed down into tiny grains of sand.

You can see how beautiful the southwest is from these pictures but you cannot feel the heat...It felt like someone had opened an oven and I climbed inside. Someone else described it as holding a hairdryer in your face nonstop. Either description, it is hot. We saw it get up to 115 degrees with no humidity, not good for a curly hair girl who depends on the southern humidity to add a little bounce :)