We have begun the only vacation I’ve ever taken (as an adult) where I’m not completely sure where we’re going. Susan has laid out all the stops; this time, I’m just the driver. (In Susan’s defense, she’s tried to tell me at least twice where we’re going — but hey, you can’t give me vacation plans during Thunder games!) The theme of this year’s summer vacation is “Go West,” so that’s what we’re going. Until, you know, we hit the coast. Then we’ll have to go east to get home. The Odyssey, she is an amazing minivan, but she does not float.

The plan as I understood it was to “drive west on I-40,” which I did for two hours before switching off drivers. When I closed my eyes, we were doing 75mph, west, on I-40. When my peppers re-opened, we were doing 30mph, headed due south, on some two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. “This is the way the GPS told me to go,” Susan said. If you like looking at cows and flat, this was the route for you. If you like looking at restaurants and gas stations, this was not the route for you. Susan, always thinking, packed a tub full of breakfast food. After not seeing a restaurant for hours, breakfast was served on a picnic table in the middle of, we assume, Texas.

I had a great joke cued up, by the way, about being in “nowhere” and then changing it to say, “Wait, we’re not in nowhere, we’re in Floydada, Texas.” The problem was, AT&T hates Floydada, Texas, and everything around it. For at least two hours I didn’t have cell signal; no data and no voice. How utterly desolate a feeling, to have no phone or Internet access in the car. It feels so … 1990s.

The GPS led us through Lubbock to main street of Seminole, Texas, where we stopped and ate at Daily Burgers, home of good hamburgers and an all-you-can-eat Mexican buffet. We avoided the untested buffet grub and stuck with burgers and nachos, which all seemed safe. The place was much nicer (and cleaner) than we we were expecting, and met my “not a chain” vacation food requirement.

We arrived at Carlsbad Caverns around 2pm and quickly got tickets. A sign in the lobby warned us that the wait for an elevator ride back to the top was “around 60 minutes.” That seemed a little excessive to me, and so in the back of my mind I was thinking about walking back up out of the caverns.

Haw haw.

The walk down into Carlsbad Caverns is much more strenuous than I remember from my list visit, back when I was a slightly-overweight-20-year-old and not a 37-year-old-morbidly-obese-fat-ass. Holy Jesus. At one point during our descent I considered hurling myself down the 750-foot decline in hopes of breaking my own neck and ending this horrible mistake. I quickly realized who all those benches along the path were for: me. At times, my knees were quivering and I was panting harder than a … I was panting a lot.

It’s hard to estimate time when you’re standing around in a darkly-lit 55-degree cavern, so I couldn’t tell you if the wait was truly an hour long or not, but whatever it was, we waited for it. All of us were worn out from the walk down. If the line for the elevator was two days long, we still would have waited.

Due to the cool temperatures and rapid descent it was almost impossible (for me) to take photos in the caverns. My camera lens continually fogged up, and due to the lighting, pictures without my flash were dark and blurry, and ones with the flash look washed out. I’ll post them online when I get more time but, yeah, they’re not great.

The kids enjoyed becoming honorary “park rangers” by performing a treasure hunt, word search and some other activities, but as far as caverns go, I thought Meramec Caverns was a much better experience (and not just because my knees are still hurting 24 hours later). Meramec was much more creatively lit and was much more appealing to look at. Carlsbad just felt like a big, never ending descent into a giant hole.

Which reminds me; today, we’re off to Williams, Arizona, by way of Roswell, NM, and and Albuquerque. I hoping to stop and see cool things and friends on the way, but I’ll have to check with the navigator first. ;)