Enchanting New Mexico

On Monday we drove from Oklahoma City to Artesia, NM. It was quite possibly the most boring drive I have ever made. I-40 through Oklahoma and Texas is about as lame as it gets. All you have to look forward to is stopping in Amarillo, TX which is actually a giant truckstop that became a city. So if you're into buying weird random things from truckstops (which I am) this is the spot. After passing through there we still had far to go. We stopped in a little town to get ice cream because the weather was hot again. So far, we have been going from hot to cold to hot again and repeating this on a daily basis. We are enjoying the heat now because from here we'll go north and it's just going to get colder and colder.

We didn't know what Artesia would be like, but I did know that they had a brewery. We arrived in the evening and decided to go check it out. The town has several huge petroleum companies based around it. There is a giant well at the end of Main St. that you can see from just about anywhere in the town. The brewery is appropriatley named "The Wellhead". I sampled all four of their beers and have to say that I wasn't that impressed. However, I was happy they were there because they did have Stone IPA on tap. Another cool landmark in the city that most people would never know about is The Artesia Restaurant and Hotel which is featured in "The Man Who Fell To Earth" starring David Bowie (so yes, Bowie has been there). There is also an old elementary school that was built during the Cuban Missile Crisis that was the only school to be built entirely underground to function as a massive fallout shelter as well... Cool facts!

On Tuesday Paul and I headed south to see Carlsbad Caverns. I saw that in Paul's diary he had refered to it as "the largest known caves in the Western Hemisphere". As much as I would like to agree with him, I am from Kentucky and know that is not true. So continuing on with the facts, Mammouth Cave (in Southwestern Kentucky) is the largest known cave system in the World! However, Carlsbad Caverns does house the largest "big room" in North America... and it was big! I've been to Mammouth Cave several times so it was really cool to see how different Carlsbad Caverns was compared to Mammouth. I wish we would've planned it better to give us enough time to walk through the whole thing. Since we only had a little more than an hour we took the elevator to the big room and walked through that. It was well worth the trip! I would love to go back there in the Summer months to see the bat flight.

The photo above is my "road soda" of the day. An extremely tart Raspberry Cider made here in New Mexico. It was a little like a raspberry slushie would taste (only minus the ice).

List for Monday and Tuesday:

• Wellhead Roughneck Red
• Wellhead Indian Basin Wheat
• Wellhead Crude Oil Stout
• Wellhead Pale Ale (the best of the bunch)
• Wellhead Cisco Canyon Blonde
• Stone IPA
• Great Divide Hercules Double IPA
• Spaten Optimator
  

Above is a video that I tossed together of some clips that I filmed while walking through Carlsbad Caverns. The music accompanying the video is a recording of "The Marsh" from last Friday in Austin, TX at One World Theater. This is from the first show and it features the vibraphone trio from UT.