Spring Break, New Mexico Style

I love long road trips.

What other way can one go from mountainous desert, to rolling hills, desert nothingness with tumbleweeds, and back up into the mountain terrain with beautiful trees all in one day?

So, when John found out he needed to be down in New Mexico for another business trip, and it just so happened to coincide with our Spring Break, I hopped on the traveling bandwagon.

I love the fact that Utah is surrounded by so many amazing states and places to see and do within just a days' drive, of which we have been to many, but surprisingly, New Mexico has never been on my list of places to visit, probably just because I didn't know very much about the state.

Now that I know what a fabulous place it is, let me try and entice you to this great deserty place with the following spiel.

It helped that we were staying up in the mountains as the southern part of the state is a tad on the dry, flat, and tumble-weedy side of things, as evidenced below -

- as seen from the canyon drive up to our pad. Yup, definitely desertish,


especially when compared to this luscious area right next to our condo.

However, amidst the desert land is this national park - full of white sand dunes you can sled down. In fact, scroll back up the the picture of my girls in the canyon two pictures above - see that strip of white in the very top of the picture? That is White Sands National Park.

Can you believe that?

We had so much fun that we went back for a second time in the evening after John got off work.


We had 3 days to play together as a family before John had to be to work, so on one of the days, we hiked on some of the trails near our condo, which led us to these old railroad trestles, one a little more crumbled than the other.


We were looking for a geocache amidst this trestle rubble, which is why we are climbing all over it.

While hiking into town, we ran into a few houses like this one with very interesting versions of foundation set on the hillside.

Anyone interested in purchasing this baby?

The song How Firm a Foundation comes to mind right about now.

Back in desertville, we encountered some really fascinating petroglyphs dating way back - there were literally hundreds of them along the hiking trail, so the girls were in heaven. It was like a huge scavenger hunt.

I of course got a sunburn that day because I left the sunscreen back at the condo. oops.

Here is just one of the 40 pictures John took of various cool carvings in the rocks. Aren't you glad I'm not making you look at all of them? You are just going to have to trek down there and see them for yourself.

The highlight of the trip though was down in a little spot out in the middle of nowhere just north of the Texas border -

Carlsbad Caverns.


We drove nearly 3 hours to get there, then spent four hours down below in the caves just wandering around in pure wonderment of the beauty and hugeness of a world completely hidden from sunlight.

Here is the entrance. Funny story, as we started walking down into the dark unknown territory, Natalie started walking slower and slower until she finally quit walking altogether, made an abrupt about-face and informed us she was going home! John luckily worked his magic on her and convinced her otherwise, especially when she started seeing all of the cool things inside.

None of our pictures even do the caverns justice, so I won't even bother posting any, other than this one of us standing in the caves.

Suffice it to say, it truly was a most amazing place.

Alas, when the week ended, we had to leave John and the sunshine so he could finish out his business trip and the girls could return to school. We commenced the 15-hour drive back, this time breaking it up into 2 days and with the help of one of my neighbors who happened to spend the week visiting her sister in Albuquerque and was looking for a cheap ride home. Win-win for both of us!

Back to Utah and reality, just in time for the snowy weekend. Sunny New Mexico, I miss you!!