We left Roswell and made it to our final sight-seeing destination of Carlsbad, NM around 11 this morning. We hit up Walmart and picked up the rental car. (yeah!)
We are staying pretty far out of Carlsbad, but the campground is a KOA and is quite nice. There is a pool and we definitely took advantage of it because of the extreme heat again. 100 degrees is hot no matter what.
We drove about 45 minutes to Carlsbad for the evening to check out the bat flight. We got there way early, so we checked out the gift shop and book store. Sarah pretended to be a caver in one of the exhibits. That was funny.
We headed over for the bat flight program around 7pm. It would start around 8pm.
During the bat flight you are not allowed to take pictures of any kinds. But before hand I took lots of pictures of more prickly pear cacti, the natural entrance to the cave, and the cave swallows, which are birds that fly around the entrance of the cave. The ranger told us that as soon as the cave swallows went into the cave we could expect to see some bats start coming out. We watched the birds disappear and just like that, about 3 minutes after the last bird went in, the bats started to fly out. At first it was just one bat at a time, then ten, then hundreds of bats. We had to be super quiet when they came out. It was amazing. The bats just kept rolling out of the cave. The ranger said there are approximately 300,000 bats in this colony. I couldn't even estimate how many we saw fly out of the cave, but we watched them fly for about 25 minutes. The sky was just covered in bats.
The view from the national park was beautiful too! We will head there again tomorrow to walk down into the caverns! 56 degrees year round down there!!
Then our journey home will begin on Saturday. We will be heading home via Wichita Falls, TX.
We have had a wonderful trip! But we are all ready for our own beds, and especially to see Izzy!!
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