Vaca 2021, Day 3, Pt 1 - Carlsbad Caverns, The First Time

Day 3 started about 6am in the camper, in some dudes driveway, with a lovable little kitty. We were all up, showered and ready to have a day with slightly less driving and some more actually seeing stuff that we drove this far for! 

Once we were all in the van and everyone having petted the kitty who wanted to, we headed off to Little Blue House for some coffee and breakfast.  Everything that they ordered was pretty amazing!  

I say "they", because I was not there when they ordered. It was busy, small and as you might imagine, crowded.  NOT MY SCENE!  My bride know's my order as well as my distaste for environments such as this.  I saw a young lady with three drinks in a holder, a large tub of hot cinnamon rolls and two young daughters, trying to figure out how she was going to get back to her vehicle while not losing any of these prized possessions.

I asked if I could help her carry her food out.  I could tell when I asked her that she did NOT want help from someone like me with fuzzy hair, unkempt facial hair and just an overall goof...  I pointed to Rob and Caleb and said, "I've been there...".  She quite noticeably relaxed and asked me to carry the drinks and cinnamon rolls so she could be in control of her two girls.  Smart mama, and my pleasure to help!

I always order my coffee black and the boldest that any place has to order.  I will say that this place had some amazing coffee and back to everything "they" ordered, the food was amazing as well even though Caleb complained all the way thru his burrito that it was "too tiny". It wasn't.

Back to the point of the post, we had 9:30 pre-ordered tickets to Carlsbad Caverns and we were off in that direction.  We pulled into the parking lot at 9:28, so just about perfect!  The site's from the parking lot were breath-taking!

Wow.  What a vast expanse!!!  That shaded hill in the upper right quadrant is Guadalupe Mountians, which will figure into the story a bit later.  Currently, it's hot and we're somewhat amazed by the scenery!

I took a picture of this cactus and then realized that there were buildings built into the hill behind it.  This became my favorite cacti until we hit Santa Fe... more on that in a later post as well.

I zoomed in on this in a photo editor and all of the vehicles surrounding the buildings are park ranger-like looking trucks.  It just looks hot!

I think this picture had the first picture of lizard which caused me to shriek like a 3-year old girl!!  I'm not kidding either.  The fact that these cold blooded killers weren't herded and corralled years ago is still amazing to me...  their hideous claws and deadly fangs and all.  Terrorism.

Uh, I think we found the cavern they show in the promotional materials.  The pictures you see in advance do NOT prepare you for what it is actually like. Just like sunsets, ocean pics and so on...

GOOD LORD!!  This thing descends pretty quickly!  I had put quite a bit of thought into this particular descent.  Why?  Because, when I walk either at work or when we're working from home, the downslopes are the hardest on my calf muscles and in turn, cause some decent pain in the knees.  I didn't want to be a big, fat sissy on the first day of vacation where we actually do something like this, but I also didn't want to ruin the rest of vacation because my friggin' legs hurt so bad.  So, I was considering, and lamenting the fact, that I was considering taking the elevator down.  I expressed this tidbit to my bride who researches this stuff to depths (pun intended!) that I just couldn't bother with.  She calmly told me that someone had just posted on one her high-tech fancy interweb info thingy-ma-bobs that the elevator was out of service.  Problem solved.

My loves a good many feet below me.  This trail is remarkable as there is no way that you would ever slip and fall. Whoever planned this was on top of their game!

I loved pictures like this where you could see a spot on the trail (the blue'ish spot) where you would eventually be, but you had NO IDEA how you were getting there or how long it would take!  Good stuff!

My wife, in a former life, was a high-school science teacher and an Earth Science major (this too will figure into the story later...) so she has good info on good authority to share with the critters.  Will they listen?  Up to them...

I cannot describe anything in this picture, but I liked the aura of it, so here it is...

I think that's Mama Chaos and Caleb, but I'm not 100% sure.  One thing that I notice is that the depth of the caves we were seeing are not really showing thru in the pics.  I remember this pic and you could see for a LONG ways in front of us.

We were quite a good distance into the cave when we came up on the next round of switchbacks!!  Can you spot Caleb, Rob and Mom in the upper left quadrant?  We were so tiny in these caves!

Another pic where you really can't tell the depth.  My guess when I took this pic was that you were seeing at least 500 - 600 yards further into the cave.

Seems to be a glitch in the matrix as Caleb's left leg has disappeared and he's fuzzy while only Rob's head is fuzzy.  I don't remember this but it appears that some natural light is reappearing.

Wow!!  A picture with both varmints and neither one had a finger headed towards the others eyedrum or even worse!  They appear to be at relative peace with some cool background too.

Another moment that would have been tough to capture on last summers vaca, Mama & Rob in a mutually agreed on selfie.

If I remember correctly, this was the Cathedral Room.

Yet another pic where you can tell that our path is longer than it appears as the railings disappear into the landscape.  The room in the back of this pic is a LONG ways away.

The lad was like, "really?" when asked to pose in front of the Chinese Theater sign.

So after a couple and a half hours under ground and seeing more and more of God's wonderful creation, we decided to take the elevator (it seems to be running, but you enter only on your on confidence!) back up the land of lizards. 

We were going to to hike at Guadalupe Mountains back in Texas, but not before we had lunch!  So we head back to Guadalupe Mountain Brewing Co. for some pizza, lemonade and beer.   The beer and lemonade was good, but their pizza was outstanding!

Next we head off to Guadalupe Mountains for some hiking...

The One That Didn't Get Away!

Caleb got invited to spend the afternoon with two buddies, Gabe and Joel.  He was in!!  In fact, he was so in that he made Ramen noodles and ate them on the front stoop waiting for Deb to pick him up!

That's Gabe, Caleb and Joel on the pond by Joel's house.

Caleb got the biggest (aka, only) fish of the day.

 

Vaca 2021, Day 2 - Wal Mart, OKC Memorial, Baker Mayfield's College's, & Lot's More Driving

I got up with the 6am alarm and I might just as well have as I was having a hard time sleeping.  My back and shoulders weren't happy with the bed and I just couldn't get comfy in any way.

On top of that, we needed to return to the Wally World for returning some of the clothing items that did not work out from our last minute shopping trip the previous evening.  Lesley was going to return to Wal Mart while I got everything packed up and ready to go (yes, she STILL trusted me with this task!).  She got their right at 7am only to find out that in WM's infinite wisdom, they do not staff customer service until 8am.

She returned to the hotel and the 3 of us not named Rob had breakfast together.  Rob was still in the room as he wanted to shower, but when I went back upstairs from the lobby with coffee for him, he was still in bed and hadn't been thru the shower yet!

Once we finally got everyone clean, fed and packed, we headed back to Wally's Revenge one more time to return the clothing.  Success!

It's time to hit the road!  We drove down to OKC and did a quick tour of the memorial.

It was interesting to tell the boys about how we were living in Tulsa when this event happened.  We had moved to Tulsa in July of 1994 and the bombing happened on April 19th, 1995 while I was sleeping as I worked at the local Venture store as an overnight stocker.

 

Almost looks like a scene from a movie like Ferris Bueller's Day Off in the way that my peeps are spaced.  Nothing funny about that fence tho...  I had to stop reading the tributes as they were making my eyes sweat.

The chairs get me every time, especially the small chairs that represent the kiddos who were killed in this nonsense.

A little heart made of pennies.  I would like to find the pictures that we took the last time we visited here as I'm pretty sure these were here at that time.  I think that would have been in 2007.

When we left here, Rob wanted to drive thru Norman, OK if it wasn't too inconvenient, as he wanted to see the University of Oklahoma campus and more importantly, the football stadium, where Baker Mayfield of his Browns played some college ball!  The football stadium is impressive, to say the least!!

Back on the road thru Chickasha, Elgin, Lawton and finally into Texas  at Witchita Falls.  The next stop was at Ranchland Gas in Benjamin, TX, where Caleb was next up at the wheel.  Oh... ah, nope.  Not correct.  Lesley drove first with Rob running the map.  We stopped at a historical marker on the side of the road and at that point, Caleb took the wheel and continued driving until Lorenzo, TX.  He was a nervous boy and kept talking about how sweaty he was!  

This whole time, I was in the back of the van, trying to fold my over-sized carcass up into any shape that would allow me to sleep.  I couldn't.  I eventually just sat back up so I could see what was going on better.

A lot of the area of Texas that we were driving thru looked pretty much like this.

Back to driving I went and we passed thru Lubbock, TX, the sight of the tour kick-off for KISS's best album, Revenge, and the other site of Baker Mayfield's college ball.  This too, while smaller from our vantage point, was a beautiful stadium!

We drove, and drove, and drove, finally arriving in Carlsbad, NM, where we were staying in an Air Bn'B that was a camper in a dudes driveway.

Our fancy digs for two nights.  You can see the roof of cabin in the upper left corner that is behind the fence and then another camper on the far right.  All 3 are for rent and were rented.  There was also a very friendly kitty who roamed these grounds.

We had a fantastic dinner at Yellow Brix restaurant and hit up a grocery store to see if we could find any local beers to bring home.  We did!

Hopefully we all  sleep good as we tour Carlsbad Caverns in the morning!

Vaca 2021, Day 1 - Driving, & More Driving

Ah, the kickoff of the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Units 2021 road trip blogposts!  I will start by saying that my wife, Mama Chaos, is THE BEST planner on the face of God's green Earth!!!  We vacation HARD, meaning there are some tough days of driving but we have the best times and stuff goes down mostly as expected.  My role is driving, and driving hard, to make things happen as they should.  

While it was definitely a blessing, we have 4 people in the car, and all four of them on this vacation are available drivers!  I LOVE driving, but when you drive 1030 miles to get home on the last day, that's a bit much for one fella, so we did some switching out and whatever, but we did it!!!

I am going to include a lot of parts of my hand written notes that I do when we're on vacation.  Hopefully it will tell a decent story.  Hopefully there will be a few educational parts of this as well, as we like to teach the boys stuff while we're showing them our beautiful country.  

Let's go!

From the journal:

Vacation 2021, Day 1

Mama had to work this particular weekend, so it was my job to pack up the van and be ready to go when she got home!  This also required me to deliver the dogs to my sisters farm as that is where they'll be living the next two weeks.  While dropping them off, I had taken them into the house and returned to the vehicle to grab one of their containers of food.  When I went back out to get the other hound's food, I saw that it had fallen out of the back of the van, into the gravel in their driving, spilling everywhere...  I don't have time for this $h!+!!!   

Back home we go...

We left Pleasant Hill around 2:30pm.  Our fist stop was in Kearney, Missouri to get gas, stretch our legs and frankly, relieve ourselves.  Once everyone was back to comfortable, we piled back into the van... on thru KC, Lawrence, Topeka, Emporia, El Dorado (while singing The Eagles Desparado at the top of my lungs!), Witchita and finally stopping in Blackwell, OK.

What did we discover when we got out of the vehicle at the Holiday Inn Express, you may be asking?  Well, we discovered that Ted, and Ted alone, failed to load Mama Chaos's suitcase into the van prior to vacating Pleasant Hill!!!  NOT GOOD!

Luckily, her shoes (that weren't on her feet) were packed into the bottom of Rob's bag, and her meds were packed into a bathroom bag, both of which, were present and accounted for!  If I were a liar, I would tell you that I thought this was funny, but I'm not a liar.  I seriously wanted to bawl!  Vaca had just started and my failure reared it's ugly head in a really big way!

There was a Wal Mart just 3 miles down the road that was open for another hour, so once we got the included luggage up to the room, we headed there for a new, swanky wardrobe for Mama's vaca.  Rob stayed behind in the room.  

Caleb found a nice, hot pink, two-piece bikini that he was going to buy me (with my money!) for my birthday. He was nearly pee'ing himself laughing.  He got me a Snickers bar instead, thank God.

Back to the hotel we went with a $100 receipt of my stupidity and we stopped at the Braun's that was adjacent to the hotel.

Not a great start...

The next 10 photos are the itinerary that me bride created for the boys to follow along with as we went. Did they use them?  No...  for the most part.  They still asked questions about what was on the docket for tomorrow and so on.  But, massive, massive credit to Mom for putting this together!

The biggest surprise of day 1's driving was the Flint Hills (or here,  or here...)in Kansas.  We saw a fairly large sign, the kind you see when you're entering a different state, from quite a distance away. Nothing was out of the ordinary at the time, fields with tree's and just normal landscape, then we finally got close to the sign and it said, "Welcome to the Flint Hills".   Okay, what does that mean?

It means that you're driving thru one of the very last prairie lands in the U.S.  The entrance was on the crest of a hill, and once you went over that hill, the tree's mostly disappeared and you saw stuff like this for miles and miles!

This picture was taken for our friend Melissa.  She's a bit of an ice cream fanatic and other peeps from our couples group had sent pictures of places they were visiting and stopped for ice cream.  Caleb is not one to wait around and ask for permissions, so by the time that I suggested taking a picture for Melissa, he had taken the top completely off of the cone and mom didn't want to send an unimpressive picture.  But this is providing evidence that it exists!

 

Evening Walk At Thomas Mitchell Park

Not much to say about these pictures other than it was a mostly beautiful evening with the exception of the high humidity!  It wasn't that bad out in the open but when we get back on the tree lined trails, it got a bit hard for me to breathe.

 

4th of July Corn Pic, 2021

 

Bacon Wrapped Tots!

This was my first attempt at them and they were pretty good.  I wanted to have a chance to experiment a bit before I took them out in public (4th of July party).

The same tots with some fine aged cheddar on the right of the photo and some pepper jack on the left.  The top was my first attempt at brat-pats (bratwurst patties).

This is the ever-loyal Juno who dialed in on exactly where the tots lived while I was making them for the 4th.  She groaned a few times...  lol!