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Trying to keep us from leaving Albuquerque
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Not Chuck Wolfe's Jeep - but it could be! (Read the windshield)
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A street light in Roswell, New Mexico
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The exit from the ladies room in Carlsbad Cavern
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Our guide and others on our cavern tour
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Incredible formations
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The caves were cut by sulfuric acid
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Water mixed with sulfur from oil deposits
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The ornamentation took about half a million years
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The caverns go down about 1100 ft below the surface
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The tours go down about 850 ft
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The largest "rooms" are 350 ft top to bottom
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The big room is about 1000 yards long
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It's 1.5 miles around the perimeter
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There's something else awesome at every turn
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The formations are extraordinary
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There's minimal hokey lighting effects
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Most lights are just plain flourescents
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Volunteer spelunkers change the bulbs when needed
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Huge things formed one drop at a time
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We were underground for about 5 hours
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Adults giggled; infants became hungry
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There's a food service 750 feet down (this wasn't it)
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The ceilings are absolutely amazing
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So are the walls and floors
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And the spaces in-between
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Explorers recently discovered a second cave near Carlsbad
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It's almost 5 times as big as Carlsbad Cavern
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There are no plans to develop that new cave for tourists
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Rangers who've been in the new cave say it's spectacular
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We think Carlsbad is beyond belief - we'll be back
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Judy was fascinated by blooming cacti just growing wild
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This is called an Ocotillo or Cholla
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There are prickly pear cacti everywhere
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Most blooms are yellow
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But the buds are pink
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This is a Cane Cactus
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The "buds" are yellow, but the blooms are pink
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Prickly pear bloom
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Each fertilized bloom become a new leaf
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One big blooming plant
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Neat door to a tourist trap
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Some blue flowers along the highway
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In the Sacramento Mts, near Alamagordo, our first view of the White Sands
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Another Ocotillo bloom
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Ditto without leaves - it only grows leaves when there is enough water!
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The national monument is a small part of the missile range
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Those dunes really are white
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Most sand is made of silica or quartz
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This sand is made of gypsum (plaster of Paris is powdered gypsum)
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There are only a few gypsum sand fields in the world
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The Yellow Evening Primrose grows only in gypsum
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The Sand Verbena - just beautiful
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This is the Mormon Tea plant
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The glare is almost impossible to handle
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Little creatures leave their marks
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These cacti were blooming by the roadside
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Great blooms - we're so lucky to be here when the desert is blooming
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In the space museum, a replica of Sputnik
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One of the first rocket-powered missiles
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Al crashes the Space Shuttle in a simulator - landing #2 was good
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An actual toilet from the SpaceLab. Don't ask.
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The New Mexico symbol in the landscaping
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A 1/96th scale Saturn rocket engine
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More blooming cane cactus
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Neat blooms
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On the museum grounds
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Lots of neat things
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The museum abuts the Sacramento Mountains
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Is that our initial in the sky? We'll end here and ponder . . .