Mammoth Takes to the Bats, Day 7

Monday 17 July

Today it was activity 4 of 4 -- go to the cave. On the way we stopped to eat breakfast at Roque Burritos and Restaurant, and it turned out to be pretty good. Maybe not a 4.7 star, as it was rated, but at least a 4.3. The salsa was very spicy and my corn tortillas seemed fresh and lovely. Ed's flour tortilla (the menu said "tortillas") was not so good--a little dry and thin. But the Huevos with Nopal a la Mexicanos were quite good. I would have thought it should have been Nopales, sort of like how "eggs with tomato" would be written "eggs with tomatoes" on most menus--the use of the singular threw me. But not nopalitos, which I am familiar with, because Wikipedia says that the term "nopalitos" designates the canned variety of prickly pear cactus. So these should have been fresh.

I would have used more onion, and more nopales and less tomato in the dish, but it was still very good.

The line to get into the cave was pretty daunting, but it moved quite well. And my "Old Person's Card" got us both in for free. Three of the very few perks of getting old are free stuff, not having to worry about what you look like (sh*t, always), and permission to sit on the benches and rest whenever you want to.

We opted to take the shorter of the two self-guided tours they had available--The Big Room route. We could have gone on the Natural Entrance route and seen the bat cave, which would have been cool. But it was 2-1/2 miles instead of 1-1/4. By the time we'd meandered around and saw all the sights, that was enough. And my toes were getting numb--one of the not-so-perks of getting old.

 

What a cave! More stalagtites that you can shake a stick at; flowstone, soda straws and cave popcorn and sometimes soda straws with cave popcorn attached to them. The coolest thing were these thin shelves where the water level had once been higher and minerals floated on the surface until they attached at the edges. 

And this--best bathroom ever!

Going up

 

But then we had to go back to camp, and it was beastly hot. About 104 according to the indoor-outdoor thermometer. Our air conditioning was holding up pretty well, but we expected the next day (traveling day) to be horrid. We can only run one of the two air conditioning units while we're driving. Ed thinks it's a faulty switch that trips and shuts off the generator; he has a new switch on order for when we return. We used to be able to run them both from the generator.

I decided that if the clouds came up again, I'd take Molly for a long late afternoon walk. If not, she may have to wait until evening. And then a shower in the lovely bathhouse, just because I like it. And the trip will be ending--only one more day and that's a short stopover in a commercial RV park. Good enough, I hope.

LATER
Did the long, late walk but it wasn't all that enjoyable. A cloud eventually came up and blocked the worst of the intense summer sunshine, but it was still hot and unpleasant. The lake was circled around with huge rocks and I really wanted to climb up on to and see over (to the water) but it just wasn't feasible. At one point I left the trail, carefully making note of how to get back to it, and walked up to the foot of the rock pile.  I could climb it--with great difficulty and loss of sweat--but not with a dog tied to my wrist. My only choice would be to let her loose so she could climb on her own or tie her up at the bottom.

I chose to do neither one. We walked further on the trail in hopes we'd get to the place where it looked like a dirt road went over to the lake and up, but I hadn't brought drinking water (inexcusable!) and Molly was getting awfully thirsty by then. So we turned around and went back. We probably walked about three miles total.

Pleasant evening. Nothing especially exciting; a few more tiny scorpions showed up in the black light flashlights. We spent a good bit of our time speculating on why one of the three flaring pipes in the distance had stopped flaring, and where exactly it had been in relation to the nearest one. Exciting camping conversation--what you do when you don't have a campfire, I guess.