Another beautiful morning to wake up to! Though the quality of the picture is not the best...
We got our oatmeal cooking and out tights on. We were ready to get out of Texas!
Can't you tell how excited we are?
We left an hour later than we were used to because we weer now in Mountain Time Zone. But we still got the rubber on the road relatively early.
We had a 34 mile ride, with a total loss in elevation of 500 ft, to get to the entrance of the park. We hammered it. The road was nice and smooth - just what I was hoping for.
I was in a great mood. It was a beautiful type of cloudy that made you appreciate the surrounding environemt - mountains cascading along our western side and plaines strewn across the east.
There really wasn't much off the the east at all.
We passed a canyon that was evidently known for its beautiful fall colors - if I had known that, I would have stopped. I still got a glimpse of some more pleasant:
Fall colors abound! I really enjoyed this area, and the day was proving to be a fantastic one.
Looks like a chunk of the north east was placed here.
Long, flat and desolate. Texas really gave us a show on our way out.
We were going to have to climb these mountains at some point today, though that point was unclear.
What was clear, was that we were finally out of Texas! after nearly a month, I realized I've been in Texas the fourth longest amount of time that I've been in any state (NJ, NY and then CA tromp it).
We reached the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns National Park shortly after. Here, we stopped at the Post Office so that Brian could pick up a package of Halloween treats sent from his mother.
It was a 7 mile climb up to the visitors center of the cavern from where we were. There was construction that required us to follow a pace car for a couple miles. Being that we were going up hill, we were a little slower than the car. They were doing construction on half the road- laying chip seal - or shit rock or whatever its caller - for some god-forsaken reason.
The climb up was not too bad at all. Tolerable, I'd say. For some reason Brian likes this stuff. I prefer the flat.
The entrance to the park was huge. Absolutely gigantic. We set out for a 3.8 mile hike through the cavern. I don't have the details, but do you know who does? Wikipedia.
Enjoy the pictures.
I must admit, the pictures looked a lot better on my phone. Oh well.
We got back on the bikes and shot down the roads that we had pedaled up before. When we reached the entrance, we pushed hard on the pedals and covered a length of 18 miles in approximately 20 minutes. I'm not joking. We hauled. We had learned of a pizza buffet ride on the southern border of the city and we were hungry. We didn't waste any time.
And we sure ate a lot.
It was such a beautiful evening when we walked out of the pizzeria.
We wandered around town for a while, trying to figure out where we were going to spend the rest of our evening. First, we rolled through a very unpleasant area of town. Honestly, I'm surprised we were not harassed by the could-be gang-bangers we saw sitting around town.
After dark, we rolled through a very nice wealthy area of town. We pedaled slowly, hoping that someone might invite us to stay with them - no such luck. Instead, we were given directions to a park and set up camp there. It was a very interesting area, where we set up camp. There was a bunch of kids hanging out by the park overlook and cars were consistently pealing out around the turn underneath the flume you see below.
Nevertheless, a very amazing day!