Fairy Land

I've decided to let Mum take over Justus5Journey. I felt like I was getting repetitive in what I was saying and I thought you all might want to hear her point of view as well. Therefore, I will still be writing Lovely Insanity but all posts on Justus5Journey (including today's) will be written by Mum.

Today we went to Carlsbad Caverns. (which happen to be back in New Mexico) So we drove BACK to New Mexico from Texas (although we'll be going BACK to Texas tomorrow) On the way there I took a lovely nap and supposedly missed out on some horrid fog; the likes of which severly decreased visibility. We got to Carlsbad at around 12 in the afternoon and swiftly proceeded to the caves. The natural entrance to the caves is this massive hole in the gound and although there is a nice zig-zagged foot path down into the caverns, you can almost imagine what it was like for the first explorers. The caverns first modern day exploration was executed by Jim White, a 16 year old cowboy working on a local cattle ranch. After treking down to the bottom of the cave, we took the self guided tour of the Big Room (a part of which is called Fairy Land) this took an hour and a half or so. Then we took a guided tour of the King's Palace. All of the 'decorations', as they are called in the caves, were absolutely phenomenal. The stalactites and stalagmites were HUGE!! However, my favorite part of the tour was the draperies. They are big sheets pf rock hanging from the ceiling that look just like drapes, hanging from the roof. Thw whole experience was amazing. This evening we went back to the cave entrance to watch the nightly exit of the bats. Although we didn't see any on our tours, we found out that there are over 100,00 Mexican Ring-tail bats living in the Carlsbad Caverns. That is A LOT of bats! When they come out of the cavern mouth at around 7 o' clock, they all spiral skyward. We assumed that they would all fly out and that would be the end of it, ut instead we found that it takes somewhere around 10minutes for all of the bats to leave the cave. They spiral out in a great, screaching worl-wind and flap off into the night sky. It was awesome. We weren't able to take pictures because the electrical disturbance of cameras and phones throws off the bats but, we did get some great shots of the inside of the caves. Once again, pictures will be up soon but we are still encountering some techinical difficulties. In the meantime, we're going back to Texas tomorrow to visit the McDonald Observatory, the darkest place in the western hemisphere. Anyways, I'd like to apologize to you all for such a lengthy and incredibly dull (and informational sounding) post. Tomorrow should be more interesting!