Day 13 - Going underground!

Woke up this morning in Carlsbad New Mexico and we drove a whopping 9 hours to get to Fort Worth Texas, another state and another time zone - (now only 6 hours behind UK). 

We'd only just set off and were only on the road about 30 minutes when we had our first stop at the Carlsbad Caverns, locals have mentioned it to us as must see and it's also in the guide book.  It was described to us as a massive underground cavern - massive?  This place was absolutely huge! 

I don't think we'll ever see anything like it again, took video and photos but there is no way they can convey the enormity of the caves.  We were going to walk to them but it takes about an hour on the trail, and instead you can get a handy lift in an elevator which takes you 750 feet underground - scary stuff I thought! 

As the elevator doors were opening I couldn't imagine that we were now underground in a cave rather than in some posh hotel but here we were!  It was v chilly down there but being English we kept a stiff upper lip and didn't give in to buying an over priced hoodie in the cave gift shop. 

We were down there about an hour and half, could have easily stayed longer as there were two other separate caves to look around.  The one we chose was called The Big Room, it literally was massive, like 25 stories high, it took us an hour just to walk around it going through the various tunnels and then it would randomly open up in to huge caves.  Like I say we could have stayed longer but time wouldn't permit it, we had a big drive ahead of us to Texas.

 


En route about 3 hours into the drive the dashboard lit up again and said running low on fuel, 66 miles left it reckoned we had, that's okay cos in 30 miles there would be a town we could fill up at (Texas is so vast that there sometimes isn't a house or shop for 100 miles).  Within two minutes after the warning on the dash board it was now saying 22 miles worth of petrol - what?  I'm not good at maths but how on earth had it dropped from 66 miles to 22 miles in two minutes!!!   Right so dashboard says only enough fuel for 22 miles but the next town is in 30 miles - even my maths can work out we're going to run out of fuel before we reach the town!  No fear Oli is here, he turns off the air con, slows the speed down and repeats the word "shit" approx 88 times!!!  The radio (before Oli switched that off too), said the temperature was over 100 degrees today, no air con equals boiling inside car temperature - I've never had a bead of sweat drip down my head before (apart from laying directly in the sun sunbathing for 10 hours).  Fear not Oli's strict fuel saving methods had worked and somehow we made it to the garage to fill up - round of applause for Oli please - my hero (I say in a Texas drawl!!)

Apart from eating on the go we didn't really stop off until we were nearly at out destination (got more fuel, wasn't going to have a repeat from earlier), where we came across a tiny recreation of a town called Thurber complete with church....it used to be a coal town, was demolished in the 1930s, and then recreated in the 1990s... nothing more to mention!

I'm typing this blog at 11pm from a hotel in a town called Fort Worth about 30mins from Dallas, but with the time change our brains thinks it's midnight and we've been driving for 9 hours!  Who knew me just sitting in a car all day would be so tiring (my main source of entertainment was to pull out individual hair follicles from my legs with my tweezers for half the journey!)...Oli must be knackered from concentrating so long (on the road, not my legs)! 

Fort Worth is a small western town (there is a  real white horse parked on the opposite pavement to our hotel).  Our hotel is called Stockyards and has been restored to look how it did 100 years ago, it's exactly what you would see in an old western apart from a few tourist features such as horse saddles for stools in the bar - all great fun!



Looking forward to exploring here tomorrow before driving through Dallas towards Memphis - long live the King:-)

Nose bleeds now 3, milkshakes 2, real life cowboys 11!


J&O