Week 1

Bob & Carol's most Excellent Adventure

Hi, to all of our grand kids and friends

You can Follow our adventures on the Map.  

View Fall 2011 Great Adventure in a larger map

Is Grandpa in Utah, Colorado, Arizona or New Mexico?

Can you tell which state Grandpa is sitting in?

Hint, there is no wrong answer.

We are at the 4 Corners Monument where the states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona all touch at this point.  This is the only place in the entire United States where 4 states touch at one point.  See if you can find this spot on the map.  

In this same general area there are lots of ancient Indian ruins.  We visited one of the ruins called Hovenweep.

The ancient Pueblo Indians built guard towers and sacred meeting houses out of rock.  They did not live in these buildings.

Our next night we spent in Roswell, New Mexico.  Roswell is famous for the alien space ship that crashed near town in 1947..............well......maybe.  There is a LOT of controversy over what happened there.  Did a space ship really crash?  Find out for yourself.  Google search "Roswell" and read both sides of the story. It's a lot of fun.

I had to visit the UFO museum to gather more information.

That night walking around Roswell, Carol met some of her distant relatives.....

Tomorrow we will be going to one of the worlds largest caves.

Can you guess which one.  Hint, look at our last stop.

Carlsbad Cavern

Here is Grandpa standing 750 feet underground in one of the most famous and beautiful caves in the United States, Carlsbad Cavern.  There are 31 miles of explored cave and more that is unexplored.  


Carlsbad Caverns National Park


This is not the longest cave in the US.  Do you know which cave in the US has 390 miles of tunnels making it the longest cave in the world?  


longest cave


Which cave is the biggest?


Carlsbad has a big room that you could fit 14 football fields inside!  I never dreamed that there could be such a big underground room.  

This is a picture inside the big room.  The column  is 80 feet tall and the wall behind is so far away that the flash does not shine that far.  

This is one of the many beautiful areas of the cave.   
What do you call these limestone formations?   How are they made?
Try google search and find out what they are called.


cave formation


Here is a hint:  The ones that hang from the ceiling are hanging on as "tight" as they can.  

Here are some stalactites that are really beautiful.  What you can not tell by the picture is how big they are.  They are as long as the motorhome.


In most of the cave there are no electric lights. And down here there is NO light coming in from the outside at all so it would be total darkness if you didn't have a light.  

Grandma and I went on a special tour with candle lanterns as our lights.  The picture looks bright  because of the flash of the camera.  This is not what it looked like as we walked the cave.  It looked much more dark like what you see around the Park Ranger in the front of the line.   This was a lot of fun.


It was Grandpa's Birthday today and it was a great day!

Love Grandpa & Grandma