When we finally left Houston a few weeks and then a couple of days longer than our target, we didn’t make it very far. Our first night we literally spent one hour outside of Houston in Columbus. But at least we were on our way. Baby steps.
The next day we drove onward to Kerrville. Our intent was to spend only one night at the Buckhorn Lake & RV Resort. However, while there, we decided that it might be good to go ahead and get new tires for the RV. The stock ones were rumored to be really bad. After several hours on the phone with the local tire dealers and more internet research, we learned that our G-rated Westlake tires were likely as good as any we could buy. We opted for a tire pressure monitoring system instead.
Since we made the decision late, we decided to spend the second night at the RV park which allowed for some R&R time. We all needed to kill the afternoon in a fun way after the hectic moving and packing.
Fishing at the RV resort.
We left the next day to head towards Carlsbad. About two hours down the road, our truck met up with a huge vulture while we were traveling at about 70 mph. It took out the passenger side mirror, but fortunately didn’t break off the entire mirror complex.
Towing a 43’ fifth wheel without a passenger side mirror is nearly impossible to do safely.
We called the Ford dealer in Ft Stockton, but they indicated they wouldn’t be able to repair it for 5-6 weeks. (“Weeks”. That’s not a typo.) In lieu of stopping there, Scott picked up a concave mirror at a truck stop. Every time he needed to change lanes, I held the mirror outside the window. It was comical but mostly effective. It allowed us to drive on towards Carlsbad Caverns. We found an online parts store that could overnight the glass-only-mirrors for the mirror complex, and we parked in White’s City, NM to wait for the parts and to see Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
In White’s City, we parked at the RV park. It turned out to be a caliche parking lot with hookups on the side of the highway going into Carlsbad. It wasn’t very nice, but it was an excellent location for Carlsbad. Scott managed to secure the mirror well enough to drive until the replacement glass came in. (It’s clear we were just coming off of the move since we had shrink wrap in the car.)
Carlsbad was amazing.
The elevator was out, so our visit included walking down into the caverns and climbing back out of the 750 foot deep cave system.
The initial decent outside of the caverns was a good indicator of what was in store for us.
The caverns (the largest in North America) are absolutely stunning.
Even having been to caves throughout the USA, Europe, and even New Zealand, everyone was impressed with what we saw during our visit. Pictures just don’t do it justice.
The kids were able to both get their junior ranger badges, while I gained more and more respect for the amount of information they were learning with the ranger books.
At this point we all felt we had really officially started our whirl wind tour of the national parks.