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new mexico is....
Jul. 2nd, 2007 12:23 pminteresting. abandoned. hot. sunny. full of herps. dry. boring. strange. fun.
yes, i know some of those contradict each other. carlsbad caverns national park was amazing, and hunting for herps on friday night was fun.... in a weird way. 8mph on the back roads with the windows down and the high-beams on, listening to queen and tartanic and keeping our eyes peeled for lizards and rattlesnakes... a bit weird. *eyeroll* it really is flat out there, except for the sudden almost-vertical rise of the hills in the west that carlsbad caverns are under. which is kinda random, imo, but very cool-looking. there are a million tiny towns there on the highways- some of them consist of less than ten buildings, only three of which have been used in the past thirty years, resulting in a definite ghost-town look. ^/____^ while we were there we went to see the bats fly at sunset, except the bats weren't cooperating and by the time they left their cave it was well after sunset and we could barely see a thing up there. but there are about 250 thousand mexican freetail bats in that cave. *boggles* bri took about a million pictures of the caverns: the main floor of carlsbad caverns ranges between 750-830 feet underground, and the lower cave, of which about a mile has been explored, is not open to the public except on harness-and-hardhat guided tours. so i had lunch about 800 feet underground on saturday. =P note the irony of naming speleothem formations things like "temple of the sun". *smirk*
so, yeah, the weekend was mucho fun. cait and i drove up, bri and i drove back: we forgot about the time change (nm is in the mountain time zone) so we thought we were gonna be late to check into the hotel, but then we ended up getting there right on time! but it took us ten and a half hours to get back to austin, much longer than on the way there. we stopped more coming back, though. it felt really good to get away for a couple of days and just hang with friends, no worries. mmmm.... yay, vacation.
and i'm going to houston for independence day. yay!!! ^/____^
yes, i know some of those contradict each other. carlsbad caverns national park was amazing, and hunting for herps on friday night was fun.... in a weird way. 8mph on the back roads with the windows down and the high-beams on, listening to queen and tartanic and keeping our eyes peeled for lizards and rattlesnakes... a bit weird. *eyeroll* it really is flat out there, except for the sudden almost-vertical rise of the hills in the west that carlsbad caverns are under. which is kinda random, imo, but very cool-looking. there are a million tiny towns there on the highways- some of them consist of less than ten buildings, only three of which have been used in the past thirty years, resulting in a definite ghost-town look. ^/____^ while we were there we went to see the bats fly at sunset, except the bats weren't cooperating and by the time they left their cave it was well after sunset and we could barely see a thing up there. but there are about 250 thousand mexican freetail bats in that cave. *boggles* bri took about a million pictures of the caverns: the main floor of carlsbad caverns ranges between 750-830 feet underground, and the lower cave, of which about a mile has been explored, is not open to the public except on harness-and-hardhat guided tours. so i had lunch about 800 feet underground on saturday. =P note the irony of naming speleothem formations things like "temple of the sun". *smirk*
so, yeah, the weekend was mucho fun. cait and i drove up, bri and i drove back: we forgot about the time change (nm is in the mountain time zone) so we thought we were gonna be late to check into the hotel, but then we ended up getting there right on time! but it took us ten and a half hours to get back to austin, much longer than on the way there. we stopped more coming back, though. it felt really good to get away for a couple of days and just hang with friends, no worries. mmmm.... yay, vacation.
and i'm going to houston for independence day. yay!!! ^/____^
