I must apologize for my poor grammar. I corrected a few items in yesterdays post. It is a learning process for myself and patience is not one of my strong suits. Having said that I found out yesterday morning that slowing down and thinking through the little things helps. Between daylight savings and passing through time zones I found myself going to bed and waking up an odd process. I also lost a screw in the arm from my sunglasses. These sound like trivial tasks, but on a Sunday morning in small town New Mexico it provided a welcome challenge.

Two trips to a 24 hour Walgreens solved the sunglasses and by the time I checked into a motel in Van Horn, Texas I knew I was an hour ahead. Lost an hour in Daylight Savings gained an hour in New Mexico, then gained another hour in Texas. With that I was on a leisurely Sunday ride east to Roswell then south to Carlsbad and Van Horn.

Roswell proved to be uneventful. The town is known for an alien aircraft crash, a military institute and farming. The latter for me was most notable. The land seems to go on and on forever. I have never been to the Canadian Prairies, but I would assume that the view would be similar. All I could see in the horizon was more grassland.

Carlsbad Caverns was the next stop and it was incredible. A beautiful national park with a windy canyon run up 9 miles to a large vista looking towards Texas. In an adobe building you enter a locked down elevator to descend 900 feet in less than a minute. The air chills and gets damp almost instantly. Down below the narrow walking trail leads you through enormous caverns dripping with huge stalagmites. I was reminded of Pierre Berton’s book ‘The Secret World of Og’. Over a hour walk around the path in the big room and back up to the land of the living.

From there I hopped back on the bike for a two hour ride through the Guadalupe Mountain Range down into Texas. I do not know if I have a preconception of Texas being big, but it seems huge. Mountains and foothills go on and on and on. I am very close to the Rio Grande and the Mexican boarder. Today I leave Van Horn and travel south to see Big Bend National Park and the Rio Grande…