The end of the road...

Saturday, June 5th

So we're still not in Plano, but the trip is pretty much done. We're hiding in a hotel room in Lubbock trying to escape the heat. This afternoon we went to the Lubbock temple, then we got a flat tire. Luckily, it happened in town and we were able to get it fixed quickly. Here's our trip summary by the numbers:

• Miles driven: 5,808

• States visited: 10

• State license plates spotted: 49 (New Hampshirians proved to be elusive vacationers)

• National Parks visited: 10 (although we really didn't spend much time in Rainier, Lassen, or Crater Lake, we had really good visits at all the rest) We also visited 2 national monuments and one national historical park.
  

• Temples visited: 7 (would have been 8, but the Albuquerque temple was closed for maintenance)

• Fast food consumed: just the corn dog at Weinerschnitzel, plus some sandwiches at Subway if that counts as fast food. We did eat a lot of Snickers bars, however - which is one of our favorite hiking snacks.

• Nights spent camping: 23 (only four nights were actually in the backcountry, the rest were in campgrounds)
  

For our next adventure, I'll be sitting in a cubicle for 30 years and Jennifer will try to save the world. We'll let you know how it goes...

Days 39-40: Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mtns

Thursday, June 3rd - Friday, June 4th

• There's a reason that the park isn't called Carlsbad Caves -the place is huge. Beautiful formations, 70-foot tall ceilings, a bat flight at sunset (like the one at Austin), and a 56 degree temperature were all reasons we enjoyed spending time 800 feet below the surface of the earth this week.

• We camped 2 nights at Guadalupe Mountains National Park (just south of the caverns) and on Friday morning decided we might as well hike 4 miles up a little mound that happens to be the highest point in Texas at 8,749 feet above sea level. We left early enough in the morning to escape most of the heat - and then quickly booked it over to Carlsbad Caverns for the 2nd day in a row to cool off.

• It's tough to take pictures in caves - but Jennifer had fun trying.

Day 38: Albuquerque

Wednesday, June 2nd

• Spent Tuesday and Wednesday night holed up in a hotel in Albuquerque - after camping 8 nights in a row we weren't feeling too adventurous, and we needed to take care of things like getting an electricity account for our new place, changing the oil in our car, getting my haircut so I don't look like a shaggy hippy on my first day of work, etc.

• We did hang out in old town Albuquerque for awhile, saw the strangest speed limit ever, a church from 1706, and went to the local art museum to see a display from Wales that included paintings by Turner, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh.

Days 34-37: In Search of Ancestral Puebloans

Saturday, May 29th - Tuesday, June 1st

• We spent Memorial Day weekend visiting Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado - we also stopped by the Navajo National Monument on our way there and the Chaco Culture National Historical Park on our way out. So, yeah - we've seen about 200 kivas.

• We learned that the term "Anasazi" is way out of fashion now. Apparently it's a Navajo word, and there are other descendants of the people in question were not happy using a Navajo word to describe their ancestors. So now everyone calls the people that inhabited the area "Ancestral Puebloans". They built cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde from about 1100 - 1200 A.D. and great houses at Chaco during roughly the same period.
  

• One interesting part of our learnings about the Ancestral Puebloans was the extent of their trade - artifacts like Macaw feathers and cacao show that they had trade routes extending to South America.

• We pondered on the fact that the absence of a written record means that much knowledge about the Ancestral Puebloans has been lost for good...there are many more questions than answers.
  

Four Corners Monument really isn't worth the trip right now:

There's actually a whole bunch of cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, you can only tour 4 of them:

I think there's a picture of me in the family photo album circa 1992 climbing up this ladder out of Cliff Palace:

Really cool Petroglyphs at Chaco, and huge great houses - though we don't really know what they used them for...