Hello Guadalupe and Carlsbad Caverns

After saying goodbye to Big Bend National Park and a long drive (about 300 miles or so) we said hello to our next national park, Guadalupe Mountain NP. It’s definitely small by National Park standards but very pretty. We decided to hike into McKittrick Canyon despite being road weary and a little hiked out after the 13 mile trek the day before. It won’t go down as our favorite hike of the trip, but we made the most of it and had a nice chat with one of the park rangers at Pratt Cabin where we had our traditional hiking picnic lunch of P&J and trail mix.

Post hike we decided we could probably make it to Carlsbad Caverns (which I keep calling Carlsberg). We made it in the nick of time to catch one of the last elevator rides down to the caves. We travelled 750 feet down in 1 minute. Yikes! What they didn’t tell us until we were headed down was that they close early and we’d only have about 30 min in the caves. We were having so much fun that we decided we would head back this morning though to see the rest. We figure, it’s our vacation and we can change our plans if we want to.

We also found a fantastic Mexican Restaurant last night for dinner thanks to Yelp.com called Rojas Mexican Grill. This was a vast improvement over Yelp’s previous suggestion in another town. That time it took us to someone’s house and we ended up at Subway (by far the best restaurant in the town of Alpine, Texas). I say this in all seriousness because after we got our sub the line was out the door for the rest of our meal (all locals). The line even included 2 gun toting Border Patrol agents. I was a little nervous about getting a drink refill with them standing there, but I risked it. No shots were fired. Phew!

We’re off to breakfast and then the Caverns. More to come…