We decided to do a two day trip down to southeastern NM. We first stopped in Roswell, or as our kids now call it "the Alien City." We had to take a photo of this store. I wonder if they're LDS?
It's probably a good thing that Lucas wasn't able to perfectly hide behind this alien and that his eyes didn't match either.
This is one of oour favorite things in Roswell, the alien street lights.
We then went to the bat flight at the Carlsbad cave entrance where at dusk a couple million bats fly out to search for food. We couldn't take photos (not allowed). Afterwards we got pizza and went to our hotel. The next morning we went back to the cave to hike down in. You hike 1.25 miles downhill into the cave. This is perhaps our favorite part. The kids were a bit worried since they'd remembered seeing the bats fly out the night before. There's switchback paved trails with hand rails all the way down in. It's a cool 55 degrees in the cave and lots of things to see. They light up various cool features inside. Here's what it looks like as you start the decent. You can see Brian, Marcus, and Lucas in the center of the photo.
And this is the view out of the cave as you go down a ways. Here's Angela and Travis posing for the photo.
Here's a view of one of the larger openings. This is the direction towards where all the bats reside down a long tunnel. You can see Angela, Travis, and Lucas just to the left of center.
Here's a rock pool alongside a cool formation.
Here's Travis with a head light. We brought 3 head lights for the kids to wear on their foreheads and pretend to be miners.
Here's Lucas at the Whale's Mouth formation.
Here's another one of the larger openings. To give you some idea of scale, look at the tall skinny pillar in the center of the photo and find the sillouette of Angela and Travis at it's base on the left.
After you get to the bottom there are restrooms and a cafe/gift shop. There's also various trails to walk around and see more formations. The kids get tired at this point but it's so much fun to see all this amazing stuff. There's nothing like it that you'll ever see. Here's our family's sillouette in front of a formation.
Just cool views everywhere!
Lots of little delicate features too.
Here's our lunch time before riding the elevator back up 800 feet to the surface again.
Here's Marcus at the sign out in front of the visitor's center.
We then went to a chile farm outside of Roswell to go to their pumpkin patch. Here's a shot of the boys before searching for their pumpkins.
We actually got special permission to go out to the patch since they weren't planning for people to go to the patch until the next day. They allowed us to go out and get first pickings hthough. Here's Marcus' pumpkin and Angela.
Travis found a larger one that he liked.
Lucas, being that yellow is his favorite color, naturally found a yellow pumpkin.
Brian decided to buy a chile ristras to buy. These are iconic symbols in NM. Many people hang them on their porch. This one was much cheaper than we usually find around town or in Santa Fe. You hang them until the chiles dry out. Then there's a special method to make a red chile sauce out of the dried chiles. It's VERY HOT if you get the right kind of chiles. Brian tried his skills at making chile the next day with some other dried chiles he had bought. We couldn't use it right away so we froze his sauce in bags. If you come to visit us we can introduce you to these hot chiles in your food.
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