We got back from our Carlsbad trip late last night. Rather than list or describe the chronology of our Carlsbad trip, I want to use this diary to record the little moments and observations that I would probably otherwise forget in a year or so (or less). I should mention that since Carlsbad is only 20 miles from Texas, and the boys had never been to that state, we naturally had to continue south to give them a look. And, of course, by then we were only ~100 miles from Mexico, so we had to detour to El Paso to look across the border. Drove a little over 2000 miles in six days. Wife drove it all, allowing me to spend most of the trip with a heeler or two on my lap. But I want to save observations like:

- Somebody needs to teach the engineers for the New Mexico Department of Transportation how to bank a highway on a curve. The outer edge of the curve is supposed to be elevated and the inside edge lowered, not the reverse.

- New Mexico has some interesting highway signs. Most western states, even those with damn few whitetails, use the standard whitetail buck sign to indicate a big game crossing. But New Mexico has manufactured their own sign for "Elk Crossing" with a silhouette of a bull elk. Cool, should have gotten a picture.

- New Mexico also has a diamond warning sign with a tractor on it for tractor crossings.

-The wife was really amused by New Mexico's liberal use of their "Gusty Winds May Occur" warning signs. She said "gusty" in a cutesy, shrug the shoulders manner. Sarcasm, as in "That's not a wind. This is a wind." They had no true wind while we were there, and since their trees all have the same number of branches on all sides, I bet they never have any real wind.

- The two male tourists from Virginia stopping to take video of the bison along I-25 in NM. Even if those critters are someone's livestock, not wildlife.

- How pleasant nearly everyone is in NM, and how unpleasant nearly everyone is in TX. Except for the elder gentleman at the Whataburger in El Paso, and Ernest Sanchez of the National Park Service at Chamizal National Memorial, also in El Paso.

- Nearly every ground floor window and door, and some on the second floor, in El Paso, TX is covered with security bars, from the 50+ hundred block east into the downtown. Or else it is a gated community.

- Saw a few dozen pronghorn in New Mexico, where they are pretty uncommon. Saw three pronghorn hiding in the shade of yucca in northwest Texas, a state where there are damn few pronghorn.

- Roswell, NM has installed old-style streetlamps along their Main St, lamps that have a slightly greenish tint to them. On the northern end of town, someone has installed large alien eyes on all the greenish globes. Looks cool.

- The wife overtipped the cute young Sonic carhop in Carlsbad. It was fun watching her go in to strut in front of the other carhops and cooks.

- The New Mexico DoT is painting all their new overpasses in NM colours (yes, beight, I prefer the English spelling here also), what I call Arizona peach and pastel turquoise (does anybody know the real name for these colours?). Looks great, makes the older bridges and overpasses look shabby.

- The sunset south of Socorro had exactly those two colours, with Arizona peach clouds and a pastel turquoise sky. If someone had painted that sky, I would have said it looked fake.

- There is an exposed basalt volcanic plug just east of I-25 north of Trinidad, Colorado that looks just like the fakey volcanoes I used to draw as a kid.

- More and more communities are switching to LED stoplights, at least for red and green. Especially Fort Collins, Colorado. They are bright and surprisingly pleasant, like the purity of a laser or Cerenkov radiation (yes, I have seen that radiation. The purest blue in the universe (literally). You see it when you stand on top of a functioning nuclear reactor core.).

- We have only had card-reading gas pumps for a year or two now. Imagine my surprise when the one at the Conoco station in Sante Fe began showing me ESPN while I pumped gas. Not even during the SuperBowl would I be that desperate to watch sports, much less golf.

- I have now traveled all of Interstate-25. (Except, as the wife pointed out, for three short, short pieces at intersections where we exited on one ramp and re-entered on another.)

- "Whataburger" has got to be one of the best kept secrets in the fast food industry. We finally decided to try it in El Paso, and the food was great! A chocolate shake that actually tasted like chocolate! Fries that were 3/4 the diameter of McDonalds' and twice as crisp and tasty. Huge, flavorful burgers. If we had one here I doubt I would ever eat McD's again.

- If I ever end up alone in El Paso, the strip/gentlemen's clubs are on the east end of Montana, along with the car dealerships, junk yards and brake shops. Some are totally nude (the dancers, not the brake shops). And you can always say you were actually next door getting a new muffler.

- The Border Patrol agents and their Broncos are spaced about 1/2-mile apart along the Rio Grande in El Paso. Nothing to do for their entire shift but sit and watch the traffic on the Border Highway and the Mexican kids playing in the river. There are patched holes all over in the chain link border fence.

- If you're gonna buy bottled water, buy Fiji^TM Bottled Artesian Water. It doesn't taste any different (water's water, folks!) but the squared bottles stay where you put them on the floor, and they don't roll out from under the seat. Worth the extra cost of shipping these things across the Pacific. (Of course, maybe they ship the "artesian" water across the ocean from Fiji in big huge rusty tankers and bottle it in Mexico. Who knows?)

- The attractive female Border Patrol Agent at the roadblock north of Las Cruces who first gave the professional glance at our license plate as we drove up, and then broke into an unprofessional grin as she looked up and saw the heeler faces hanging out the window. She apparently decided we were unlikely smugglers of either contraband or illegals, but she made us hold up traffic long enough to tell her what breed the three dogs were.

- The most cheerful employee in Carlsbad NP was the guy running the elevator that ran 750' up from the cave floor to the top. He must make the exact same run with nearly identical loads of tourists every ten minutes, giving the same spiel about elevator speed, load, construction and depth. And yet you could tell he enjoyed it. Real pleasant, short encounter.

- There are only four elevators out of Carlsbad Cavern. Two were out of service, with signs and benches blocking their doors. Since there is only "Top" and "Bottom", the elevator indicator lights show depth in 50' increments. Both functional elevators came down in response to our buzz. The slower elevator stopped at 450', went back up to 400', and stopped again at 450'. When we disembarked at the top, the announcer on the PA was calling for maintenance at the elevator. What happens when the fourth elevator breaks down? There are hundreds, if not thousands of people down in that cavern, many of which could never make the mile and a half hike up 10 stories to get out (the way we went in).

- Stumbled upon a town in New Mexico with my wife's maiden name. Took photos at their Post Office, which was closed. Had to go another 40 miles to find an open store to get a postcard. Wife sent it to her mother, mentioning the town, but I think we should have driven the 40 miles back to mail it from the town itself. Would have added an hour and a half to the journey, but I know we'll eventually wish we had turned around.

- One of the prettiest sights was a lone Prunus tree in full pink bloom in the middle of a solid green juniper forest south of Romeroville, New Mexico.

- They are subdividing the Texas desert east of El Paso like crazy. Apparently their zoning only takes effect with tracts smaller than 10 acres, because each lot sign gave the lot size, with the smallest being 10.01 acres. Lots of survivalist and Posse Commitatus type places. One with an American flag by the gate worn to shreds. And they probably support the flag burning amendment. All I can say, the more of that land they sell to those folks there in Texas, the fewer of those weirdos we'll have to deal with here.

- The abandoned steel mills in Pueblo, Colorado would make a wonderful post-apocalypse movie set. Also a large abandoned building on the north edge of Trinidad.

- There is still a standing railroad roundhouse(!!) in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

- The bats don't really start swarming out of Carlsbad until May. They're Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis), and don't truly hibernate, but they don't go out much either until the bug densities make it worth the effort. Park Service bat programs don't start until May, but visitors are allowed in to watch for bats at dusk anyway. So naturally we went. Had a total of eight bat sightings (and two shooting stars). One bat silently whipped by only a couple meters directly over us (only I saw it, but I was the only one laying on his back on the stone benches). The first was a bat that came up out of the cave, then quickly dove back in. Checking to see if the tourists had arrived yet? Best part was spotting a ringtail cat (Bassariscus astutus) in the headlights as we headed down the canyon. Have only seen a ringtail once before in my life. At Carlsbad Cavern in December 1974. Amazingly, I still remembered the scientific name. It did a good job of waking the heelers up. "Nobody told us there were cat-squirrel-raccoons on this road!"