Roswell, New Mexico - UFO's and Aliens
Just spent a great day in Roswell, New Mexico - visited the UFO museum and a bunch of great shops. The best one was Alien Zone / Area 51 on 216 N. Main Street - just a block down from the UFO museum. It had great toys, and all the T-shirts are original artwork drawn by the Owner of the store. They have the best T-Shirts by far, and they are very resonably priced at $14 each. You can't get these designs at any of the other local shops.
The Alien Zone gift shop also have a real cool Area 51 room (modest $2 entry fee) where you can take photos posed with aliens in many cool settings. Our favorite was the anti-gravity room (see photo). You can see more of the photos on our Flicker Page. They don't have a website yet but they have the best prices of any of the many UFO gift shops around Central Ave.
Roswell is a great little town and lots of fun. The UFO museum itself is fairly interesting, it has a lot of newspaper clippings, official US Government Documents about the protocal for dealing with EBE's (extreterestrial biological entities) and several other cool exhibits. Unless you are really interested in a lot of reading the avidavids of witnesses and several other documents related to the UFO crash that was reported in the Roswell newspaper in July of 1947, you probably wont want to spend too much time there, its very interesting but not real exciting and kids would probably get bored pretty quick - although a few of the children that were there were actually spending quite a bit of time reading the extensive exhibits from cover ups, to surgically removed implants! There are also some pretty neat photos of real UFO's and Hoaxes (by real I mean the photos have been examined and deemed authentic photos of objects that could not be identified, what they actually are is anyones guess...).
Lodging/Hotels in Roswell, NM
In Roswell we stayed at the Days Inn on Central Ave just a mile or so past the UFO museum. The Marriot was over $120/night and the Days Inn was only about $140 for two nights (with the AAA discount). The rooms are very nice and clean, free HBO, new appliances: microwave, fridge. Much newer and cleaner than the Carlsbad Inn. These rates probably increase during the summer and during the UFO conventions (One coming up on March 24th)
Carlsbad Caverns
Overall its a definite must stop for any cross country roadtrip and its only about an hour north of Carlsbad, NM which is the closest town to Carlsbad Caverns. The caverns and the National Park are incredibly beautiful. The mountins and sheer rock cliffs along the drive to the caverns enterance offer plenty of breathtaking photo opportunites. The Cavern itself is just plain awesome. We just caught the last self-guided tour at 2PM (so get there early) and the hike through the upper cavern is about an hour, deep down into the earth and is filled with countless amazing natural rock formations. The trail is paved, but it does get pretty steep (almost all downhill) and wet - you definitly need a flashlight as the cave has a lot of internal lighting but much of the path is very dark and the flashlight came in handy.
After the hour hike in through the cavern you reach the elevators and a underground giftshop and bathrooms. From there you can tour another hour long path through the "grat room" which has so many incredible formations and variety of stalagmites and stalagties, as well as other bizzare formations, plenty of great photo opportunities but you will need to use your cameras night-shot setting and use a tripod or find a steady place to allow for the long exposures required. Believe me its well worth it! we got some AMAZING photos in the great room which are on our carlsbad caverns flickr page.
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