We Are Home!

Over the past 6 days we have traveled from New Mexico back home by way of Austin Texas. Some of the highlighes are:

• Traveling from Las Cruces to Carlsbad Caverns via El Paso
• Seeing the bats (300,000 of them) leave the caverns at sundown
• Walking down into the Carlsbad Caverns and through the "Big Room"
• Traveling through central/western Texas to Austin Texas
• Visiting the Lyndon Johnson boyhood home in Johnson City TX
• Drive through east Texas to Shreveport LA.
• Drive through Philadelphia Mississippi and the Neshoba County Courthouse, sight of the "Mississippi Burning Trial"
• Night in Tuscaloosa Alabama that just happens to be the night before the Alabama/Tennessee football game.

I am not going to write the complete trip report for this week, but here are some of the pictures we made along the way.

Here we are at a roadside picnic table in west Texas with the Guadalupe Mountains in the background. This is on Highway 62/180 between El Paso Texas and Carlsbad New Mexico.

The Guadelupe Mountains span the border of Texas and New Mexico. Our route will take us over these mountains and on toward Carlsbad Caverns NM.

Here is the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. The 'theater' in the foreground is where we sat to watch the 300,000 bats exit the caves at dusk. These bats make their way over the desert to the Pecos River miles to the south to feed on insects, then return at dawn to their roosting place inside the caves.

Monday night's camp spot in the Rio Conchos State Park just north of San Angelo Texas

This is the homestead of the grandfather of Lyndon Johnson in Johnson City Texas. I visited LBJs boyhood home near this site.

Headed back east, here is the Mississippi River and I-20 in Vicksburg MS.