Our plan after Santa Fe was to visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park that afternoon and then drive to Austin, Texas the next day.
Carlsbad Caverns are a series of huge caves that are accessible via an elevator. The last elevator trip into the caverns is at 5pm and with a 4 and half hour drive to get there we knew that is was going to be tight. We left Santa Fe just after midday with our fingers crossed. The road south through New Mexico was long, straight, and empty. The route took us though ghost towns (not the cool western type), had us dodging massive thunderstorms, and skirted around Roswell.
The landscape was again not what I had expected. It was almost entirely grassy plains and small areas of forest. It was at this point that we realised we were not going to see the classic western desert at all on this trip.
We finally conceded defeat about an hour north of the Caverns when we realised that our ETA of 57 minutes was only to the park entrance and that there would be another 15 minutes to get to the cave entrance. We stopped at a Taco Bell to come up with a new plan. We looked an nearby campsites for a while before someone suggested that we might as well just keep going all the way to Austin as the day was already a bit of a write off from so much driving. Google suggested that Austin was another 7.5 hours away so with no better option we stocked up on coffee and got back on the road.
The town of Carlsbad is close to the border with Texas and it wasn't long until we crossed. The welcome sign had fallen off but we could tell that we had crossed the line when the road instantly became much wider. All of a sudden we were driving through oil country with wells and gas vents in all directions. The only other vehicles on the road were oil trucks which drove incredibly dangerously. One that was coming towards us overtook another and crossed into our lane forcing us into the median.
It quickly became dark hiding much of the landscape from us. As we drove we passed hundreds of huge wells light with red lights. At times they were quite confusing as they looked light the tail lights of cars off in the distance. The roads were very dark and it took a lot of concentration to stay focused.
As we got close to Austin we left the interstate and took a local road through a forest. As we rounded a corner we almost hit a deer standing right in the middle of the road. A few minutes later the same thing happened with a dog standing eerily still. Rez swears that it was a wolf. All I know is that there was something incredibly spooky about it. We continued to pass deer for the rest of the drive but thankfully had no more close calls.
It was almost 2am when we arrived in Austin. We had booked a room at a Motel6 and had to navigate Austin's incredibly confusing freeway system to find it. This was made harder by the fact that there was a Motel6 every few miles along the road. As it turned out we ended up at a different one to where we had booked but we didn't figure this out until later.
A lot of words about a pretty uneventful day. Sorry about the lack of photos, none were taken...