Daily Narrative    The day began long before dawn in west Texas.  With temperatures promising to hit over 100 degrees by noon, and the bus lacking the modern convenience of a radiator to cope with this, we were on the move by 5:30am.  As the sun rose, we found that we had climbed up onto a plateau in the darkness the night before and were dropping back off of it this morning.  It was actually very pretty to look at, despite what we have said about Texas.  Also of considerable note to us was a near total lack of humidity.  As we coasted down off of the plateau toward Fort Stockton, the temperature continued to rise and we couldn't help but notice this could be pretty scary country for the bus to take a halt in.  But the bus performed like a trooper when the heat was on (pun intended), and by noon we were closing in on New Mexico and Carlsbad Caverns.  Even with getting out of bed at 5:00, we were about two hours late trying to stay ahead of the heat and the temperature was nearly 105 degrees by the time we hit the Caverns around 1:00pm.  Sad for the bus and unpleasant for it's passengers.  We parked at the visitor's center, ate a little, and bought entry into New Mexico's own little piece of Alaska summertime.  At roughly 60 degrees year round, the "weather" in the caverns had us smiling for hours.  There was also some pretty awesome geology going on under this patch of New Mexico desert.  The caverns were about a three hour hike and we opted for the audio tour, sort of a walkman-like experience with different prerecorded pieces of information being prompted by transceivers throughout the caves.  We give Carlsbad Caverns two thumbs up.  We resurfaced around 4:30 to air that had not cooled a bit and gently urged the bus on to Artesia, where all three of us enjoyed a car wash, before driving on to Roswell, through a much appreciated thunderstorm, for the evening.

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Daily Pictures

Another early morning.  This time in Kerrville, Texas	Sunrise in west Texas
We dropped back down off of what we believe was the Edwards Plateau...	...to the temporarily green pastureland of the desert below
Green pasture pretty quickly gave way to sagebrush  and desert	And these odd trees
A couple of cows found to first standing water we have seen all day, a little east of the Carlsbad Caverns	At first it was "Ooh, look cactus!", but the novelty wore off over the hours
Adobe pueblos built by the CCC in the 1940's for Carlsbad employees and operations	The Cavern's entrance
Can you feel the temperature dropping? We can!	Just inside, looking out
We could bore you with the scientific details about these, but we'd have to remember them, so we'll just stick to simple descriptors	Pretty
Tall	Complex
Our journey's first subterranean gift shop	The best car wash we've collectively ever had turned up a sign we thought got to the point.  We can see a use for teachers

Settling in Roswell for the evening, we had an uneasy feeling we were being watched...

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