Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM

Today we visited Carlsbad Caverns. Wow! They are very cool. If you want a bigger cavern, you have to go to Borneo.

We spent the morning in the city of Carlsbad. We stopped at a RV campground and paid to take showers (ahhhh!) and do laundry. The proprietor even gave us two showers for the price of one. While our clothes were drying, we went to the grocery store and bought some “cold” food. We’re camping at Guadalupe National Park, and no fires are permitted, so we can’t heat up cans of soup as we’d like. Then we had some more time to kill before our dryer time ran out, so we stopped at a Mexican restaurant. Unfortunately, it was closed (it being Sunday and all, but it’s hard keeping track of the days of the week). So we went down the road a ways to another Mexican restaurant. Its parking lot was full! Unfortunately, it was also full of white people, including wait staff. Our usual policy is if a Mexican restaurant has any white people in it at all, it’s got to be expensive and bland. But we ordered anyway. Sure enough, both rules of thumb were true. At least we had refillable fountain drinks (a Coke for me and a Dr Pepper for Berck) and complementary sopapillas.

The waitress was a little later than we would have liked delivering our ticket, but we were soon back at the RV stop. Only to find out that the office was closed from noon to one. ARGH! How were we going to get our laundry? What were we going to do for an hour? We pondered this for a few minutes. I was worried that we wouldn’t have enough time to explore Carlsbad Caverns (and indeed we wouldn’t…the last entry into the cave is at 2 o’clock, and the Caverns are a bit of a drive away).

I was so frustrated. This was our day to see the Caverns! “Everything happens for a reason,” I reminded myself. I truly believe this. Call it superstition, call it faith in providence, call it predestination. So I calmed down. Then I wondered if there were a back door to the office and laundry room. I walked around past the showers, and an ajar door led to a game room. I walked through the game room and and looked for another door. There was the laundry room! Unlocked and open! Berck and I agreed that we would have looked pretty silly sitting there waiting for the office to reopen when we didn’t even need to walk through it.

We were folding the clothes when suddenly my bowels insisted on emptying themselves NOW. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I told Berck. I stuffed my bag shut and ran for the bathroom. Yikes! Five minutes later I felt a lot better. Berck finished up folding his clothes and was on his way back to the car when suddenly he realized why I had had to go. After he spent five minutes in the bathroom, we were ready to go. We decided that the “Mexican” restaurant was to blame. We’ve been just fine for the rest of the day.

As I think back, if the waitress hadn’t been slow delivering our check, and if we hadn’t dawdled bemoaning the loss of our laundry, we would have been down the road too far to be in sight of a bathroom. There’s NOTHING for the 20 miles between the city of Carlsbad and the Caverns.

I’d like to write about our wonderful hike in Guadalupe National Park yesterday, but we’re back at the campsite, and the computer can’t run off the car’s power anymore.