Sadie & Papa XC Adventure - Pix from the Good Camera

I'm not sure how much better these photos are than the ones I took with my phone and it really is a lot of photos of Sadie all in one place, but I promised to post them, so here they are!

GRAND CANYON

Ooh Ahh Point - Grand Canyon

THE PAINTED DESERT - PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK

WHITE SANDS NATIONAL PARK

Those are the picnic shelters in the background.

CARLSBAD CAVERNS NATIONAL PARK

ST. LOUIS - THE GATEWAY ARCH (it's a National Park now too!)

Sadie & Papa XC Adventure - Day 6 - Carlsbad Caverns

After another cold, pre-wrapped "continental breakfast", we packed the car on Wednesday morning and drove half an hour down the road towards Chihuahua, Mexico (only a few more miles away) to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I didn't know what to expect. I thought it would be some deep, dark, damp caves we would walk through and then say, "okay, we did it." But WOW! 

There is really no way to capture the enormity and wonder of the caverns and all the stalactites and stalagmites and calcified craziness and, most of all, how massive and cathedral-like the space is. It resembles nothing so much as an impossibly-ornamented, enormous, gothic church.

Sadie says it was her favourite of the parks we've visited. 

Anyway, here's a few pics I snapped. 

After the caverns, we stopped at Sonic Burger for lunch (and milkshakes) and then took off for Oklahoma City. 

The road was long, flat, straight, hot, dry and mercifully fast. Dinner was corndogs and chicken nuggets at a gas station rest stop in Benjamin, Texas. 

West Texas really is the antithesis of everything I look for in a place - except that the people we encountered were very nice and the bathrooms were clean.

We made it to OKC on the late side and that was our day. It was another good one. 

Sadie & Papa XC Adventure - Day 5 - White Sands NP & Roswell

We made it to Las Cruces, NM on Day 4 and, on the morning of Day 5 we enjoyed a brief frolic in the indoor pool of our motel before picking up breakfast and a picnic lunch at Sprouts (like Whole Foods but smaller). Then we drove off into the Chihuahuan Desert. 

Our first stop was White Sands National Park, which, like Petrified Forest NP, turned out to be relatively easy to explore from the car. We drove out the loop road to the picnic areas at the end and did an entirely unexpected activity. 

Click to watch the video. 

They sold the sleds and wax at the gift shop at the park entrance. Sadie was sure I was joking about going sledding in the desert until we actually did it. She was game though and had a great time. 

After sledding we had lunch in one of the many shaded picnic stations along the dunes. 

On the drive out of the park, Sadie asked to stop so that she could touch one of the strange plants that grows on a sand tower in the shifting dunes. She had learned about them from a short movie at the visitor center a couple hours before. Her curiosity makes me very happy. 

Afterwards, we headed north to Roswell, just to see what sort of crazy alien attractions they had for us. They delivered the crazy. 

First stop was a self-guided tour through an alien experience.

After that, we walked across the street to Spaceport Roswell and did the 20 minute virtual reality experience of the 1947 alien crash landing - from the POV of the aliens! Sadie's mind was blown! 

We made it to Carlsbad, NM by nightfall, had dinner at Chili's and were checked into to our hotel by 9:15 where Sadie stayed in the pool almost until it's 10 PM closing time. 

All in all, a pretty good day!