We decided to stop and visit Carlsbad Caverns on our way by. We haven't been to the caverns for about 19 years, so wanted to see if there had been any changes made. When we went through, there were still guided tours and they also had colored lights throughout the whole cavern area. When we were there, in 1990, there was no visitor center and we parked out in the dirt.

Well, now there is a visitor center and a paved parking lot. We actually were able to find a spot to park the bus and car. The RV parking spaces were all filled up, so we parked on the other side in the regular car spaces. If you have a National Park golden age/golden access pass, you don't even have to pay for the tour. There is no guided tours anymore for the masses, you go at your own pace and they have an audio tour, where you buy a headset or two and at the numbers, you press the corresponding number on your headset and it tells you the history about that spot you're standing at. We just bought one and I carried it.

We couldn't go into the natural entrance that day, because there were some migrating bats coming in on their way south and since they don't live in the caverns, I guess they were a little leary of going so far inside and like to hang out around the entrance. So, they didn't want the people scaring them, so we had to go down to the caverns in the elevators. (When we first toured these caverns, we did go through the natural entrance and I couldn't believe it when we got to the end of the tour and went up in elevators.)

Once we got down there, another surprise was seeing the restaurant, (now closed for the season) and some tourist items down there. I know they didn't have all that when we were there last. The lighting down there wasn't very good for taking pictures and since the shutter speed was so slow, it was extremely hard to hold the camera so still, so a lot of our pictures came out blurry. But, a few of them did turn out okay, so those are the ones I'm posting.

We did talk to a ranger on our way back out and they are trying different lighting, like maybe LED, rope lighting or something that doesn't cause algae to grow in the cavern. They will be redoing the wiring in the whole cavern, because some of it goes back to the 1920's and all the remodeling will probably take about 3-4 years. Don't know if they will close the cavern or just close parts of it while they are doing all this work, but, it should be real nice once they are done.

One other thing we learned, well, I learned, while we were walking through. Remember, I have the headset. One of the things the rangers have to do on a regular basis is pick lint off all the decorations in the cavern because of all the people walking through. Tons of lint come off of our clothes on a daily basis, think about what the lint trap looks like in the dryer from just one load of clothes. If they didn't do that, I can't imagine what the stalagtites & the stalagmites would look like with lint all over them.