Lemonade

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. With our bad luck with the Jeep's water pump, we did the best we could to have a good time in Carlsbad until we could get on our way. Our plan for Sunday was to arrive in the region, see the caverns, and head out. Instead we broke down, got a hotel, and spent Sunday waiting for Carlsbad businesses to open. On Monday, today, we rented a car, went to the caverns, had a wine tasting, had delicious dinner, and rested in another nice hotel while the car repairs were completed. That's making lemonade!

This morning we worked our way out of our hole. First we got our bicycles out of the trailer, which thankfully was near our hotel. Being on bicycle in 100 degree weather is way way better than being on foot! (But way way worse than being in a car!) After checking in with Ross Hyden Jeep, we peddled to Enterprise for a car rental. But oh noes! The lady there told us she had no cars to rent! No, wait, suddenly and magically she had a car for us, but it was across town at the airport. We agreed to take it, and by the time she was done filling out the paperwork there was a car she could rent at the location. Great!

She also gave us a tip: have dinner or stay at the new Trinity Hotel, so we went ahead and got a room because we expected the Jeep repairs to take another day. We got some groceries for lunch and drove to the caverns. The caverns were amazing! I wish I had more time to go on more tours down there. We are going to go back briefly tomorrow morning to do one more walk before leaving the area.

When we returned to the caverns we came back to the Trinity Hotel, which turned out to be a lucky find: it's only been open a few weeks, it's extremely posh and yet reasonably priced. We had a wine tasting in the restaurant including bruschetta, then ate filet mignon and crab ravioli. The hotel room is incredibly nice and they thought of things like having ample electrical outlets. The shower water falls like rain from the ceiling. We took a walk around the riverfront here in Carlsbad, too, and watched the electrical storm in the distance.

Today turned out to be really great, a really tasty lemonade instead of a really sour lemon. We will pick up the Jeep tomorrow morning and should be on our way before noon. I will post pictures from Carlsbad Caverns after our second visit tomorrow. Then we need to bust it across the country to Great Smokey Mountains National Park.