We also saw a newborn baby calf which was exciting for us but boring for the dairy since they have a birth almost every day. We also got to learn how to artificially inseminate a cow... it involves putting a hand inside of the cow. Yeah, pretty gross.
The little baby calves were super cute and we visited with them before visiting Trenton's pecan trees.
His family also has a landscaping business so they have a lot of different kinds of trees, and among them are large pecan trees. There were a ton on the ground that we cracked open; they were delicious! Trenton had to head to work so we said goodbye to him and his house before hitting the road for Las Cruces!
Our next stop was Carlsbad Caverns. Unfortunately, we (Josh) left my tripod at Trenton's house, so we could only take photos of each other in Carlsbad. I took this fantastic photo of Josh, and Josh took this one of me. Pretty embarrassing!
Josh and I walked the self-guided "Big Room" route in the Caverns, a one-mile path around the perimeter of the 8-acre Big Room, and it was great! It was very neat to think about the first explorers in the 1920's who climbed into the cave and used their lanterns to investigate! Josh took a photo of an original ladder from a 1924 exploration... the ladder drops into a deep hole that goes into the Lower Cave.
I thought we would be taking a five hour drive through New Mexico to get to Las Cruces but Josh found a much shorter route through Texas, so after Carlsbad we went farther south and saw some beautiful mountains, including the Guadalupe Mountain National Park.
We hit pretty bad traffic as we came out of El Paso but we have been listening to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" on audio book which kept us entertained! Our stop for tonight is Las Cruces, New Mexico, but up until yesterday we didn't have a Couch Surfer host to stay with. Initially we did, but our host stopped contacting me so I sent out a few last-minute requests yesterday afternoon and almost immediately received a phone call from a girl, Meredith, who said she and her roommate were able to host us!
We got into their apartment after dark and made pasta for Meredith and Neeshia to say thanks for hosting us last minute. They're about our age and in graduate school at New Mexico State University for biology and wildlife sciences, and we had fun talking about movies, books, and music before getting ready for bed.
My high for today was how much of a surprise Lovington turned out to be!! Lovington is such a small town and I picked it just because it was on our route, but I had a great time! Josh's low was the unique experience of the dairy farm. My low for the day was the smell from El Paso to Las Cruces... the stench of cow poop made me think I might die. Josh's low is me keeping him awake while typing this :( My "ho" for today is that in almost every single city we have visited we have encountered a Martin Luther King Boulevard. A few cities ago we thought the pattern was hilarious and figured it wouldn't continue, but it has! My GPS even wanted us to take MLK through El Paso tonight... we chose to avoid it, for once! Josh's "ho" was finding a tube of Tom's of Maine toothpaste at like 90% of the houses we've stayed at!
No comments:
Post a Comment