Fort Worth and Guadalupe

 On Friday morning we had a short drive from Arlington to Fort Worth, Texas. Our first stop was the Fort Worth Stockyards. We had a guided tour and also watched a cattle drive. If the schedule had permitted, we would have seen the rodeo that night, but when I was planning the vacation, I couldn't figure out a way to include that in our itinerary. Thankfully, the kids did see their first rodeo last year in Pennsylvania. Nadia and Ian bought Oliver a cowboy hat as an early birthday present. Oliver got himself a ring. He has wanted a ring for more than a year. Paul was opposed to this idea since he himself doesn't like to wear jewelry of any kind. It was a compromise on his part to agree to wear a wedding band. I didn't have any issue with Oliver buying a ten-dollar ring with his own money. Our second stop in Fort Worth was the zoo. This zoo has cheaper admission rates than the one in New Orleans, and they also participate in AZA reciprocity, so we received a 50% discount on all five tickets which meant it was much cheaper to visit this zoo. I thought it was a better zoo. A few years ago, USA Today had a list of the ten top zoos in the country. The Audubon Zoo was 7th on that list, and the Fort Worth zoo was 2nd. US News and World Report also has both zoos on their top 27 zoos in the country list. We didn't see any kangaroos in New Orleans, and they are one of my favorite animals. In Fort Worth one of the highlights were watching a baby elephant play in the water. When he trumpeted, his mom came a running to him! We also enjoyed watching a giraffe interact with his parent. Paul especially liked seeing the rhino in the water. 

After we left the zoo we began the long drive to Carlsbad. We stopped for dinner at a family-owned pizza place along the way. Pizza is definitely the most affordable option for dinner. Paul wouldn't mind if we had pizza every single night. Oliver would object the most strongly to that notion, and I'm also not a fan of having it anywhere near that often, but this was the first time we had pizza on the trip. I had driven from the zoo to our dinner stop. Paul was driving from dinner to our hotel. We gained one hour on the drive as we left CDT and entered MDT. We were in Texas for most of the drive, but near the end we entered New Mexico. At one point Paul got in a passing lane to pass a few vehicles, and it turned out there was a large metal object on the road in the passing lane which we ran over. The rest of the drive was rather stressful as we didn't know what damage had been done. All Paul could see was a plastic guard under the vehicle had been damaged. The vehicle has been running fine, thankfully. Since it happened on a Friday night and shops are usually closed on the weekend plus Monday is Memorial Day, we haven't figured out yet if we need to do anything before we return the vehicle on Tuesday evening. I'm very thankful it's still been running fine as many times out west you can go for many, many miles without seeing any businesses of any kind.

Our first stop on Saturday was Carlsbad Caverns. My top three caverns that I've been to are Luray, Mammoth, and Carlsbad. I think Carlsbad is my most favorite. At one point my grandparents lived in Artesia, New Mexico, which is not far from Carlsbad. Unfortunately, a couple of months ago they announced the indefinite suspension of all guided tours due to a lack of park rangers. That was very disappointing. You still need a timed ticket to enter the cave. Thankfully I did get five of those for us. There were many people at the park yesterday who didn't have reservations and therefore weren't able to enter the cave. There was a bat flight last night, but again that didn't fit in our itinerary, and I think the one we saw at Bracken Cave is more impressive (plus they don't allow any photos or videos to be taken of the bat flight at Carlsbad). We opted to take the elevator down to the cave rather than climb down and up the equivalent of a 75-story building by way of the natural cave entrance. We spent about an hour down in the caverns. It was just as amazing as I remembered. The kids each worked on two Junior Ranger booklets after our tour. The one booklet that was for 13+ took Nadia awhile to finish, and Ian eventually threw in the towel on completing it. Nadia and Oliver earned two badges at Carlsbad, and Ian earned one. Carlsbad Caverns are underneath the Guadalupe Mountains.

I often use the term "National Park" loosely to refer to all of their sites whether they are monuments, historical sites, battlefields, preserves, seashores, etc. There are 433 national park units, but only 63 of those are actually designated National Parks. Some people make it a goal to visit all 63 National Parks. I don't have that as a goal because some of them are located in places like Guam or are really difficult to get to (like many of the ones in Alaska). On this trip we will have visited four of the 63 National Parks - White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains, and Saguaro. We plan to visit two more in August in Hawaii, which will put us at almost half (30/63). It was about 100 degrees when we were hiking at Guadalupe Mountains. We had planned to hike a trail that was a little over 4 miles round trip. In light of the heat and how much of the trail involved scrambling over large rocks, we didn't make it to the end of the trail, which was a disappointment to me as I had also missed the slot canyon in 2021 due to my broken ankle. We hiked for a little over two hours altogether. At one point Ian got lost and started climbing the trail up to the peak (which is a 9 hour round trip hike). Thankfully he figured out his error and rejoined us. Hopefully he learned his lesson not to hike alone. We had dinner at the only restaurant along the highway for more than an hour - Cornudas Cafe. Thankfully we got there before it closed at 6:00 pm. We were their last customer for the day. We ended our day driving to Alamogordo, New Mexico in preparation for visiting White Sands National Park today.