June 16-17, 2010

June 16-17, 2010

It is summer in Tucson and we are late getting out of town. Today we finished packing the RV, secured the house, and started our journey east. As I drive I am thinking I hope I got the watering system understood enough I don’t kill our orange trees while we are gone. Since we left at noon we only make it to Las Cruces, NM by dinnertime. Not a problem since the historic original town of Old Mesilla has the best Mexican food around.

It is almost as hot here as it is in Tucson. Feeling overheated we make a detour to revisit Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Despite the heat, the cave temperature is always in the 50’s. Ah, feels good. And even the second time the cave is pretty cool. The natural entrance is a long continuous downhill hike of 75 stories, kind of like descending into the bowels of the earth. So much so, that is why they filmed the sixties classic, “Journey to the center of the earth” here.


But we are not really at Carlsbad to see the cave again. We are here to see a spectacle of nature. During summer the cavern is host to a huge colony of bats visiting from Mexico. So in the evening we attend a ranger talk at the cave entrance and when the sun sets, a swarm of bats as thick as smoke flies out the entrance. For a solid twenty minutes, tens of thousands of bats circle upward from the cave depths in a whirling vortex. Once at the entrance they stream to our right in search of their nightly meal of insects.