Attractions

White Sands National Monument: the sand looks and crunches like snow (New Mexico Department of Tourism) [enlarge photo] FEBRUARY 2005 ISSUE • Table of Contents • Secret Hotels of the Caribbean • Australian Road Trips • Southern New Mexico • Reykjavík • A Month in New Zealand • Bedbugs are Back • New Lessons in Online Savings

Maybe that's why aliens thought this was a good place to crash. Northwest of Roswell, just before midnight on July 4, 1947, a flying saucer came down. The wreckage was hauled to the local military base. Then, (a) the government switched the saucer for a weather balloon and hushed it up, or (b) it was a weather balloon all along. Roswell's International UFO Museum and Research Center offers both sides of the story, though there's an obvious slant. The highlight is a tiny piece of metal found near the crash site, a metal like none other on earth. But the teenagers walking through the museum--wearing top hats embellished with bright-green aliens--aren't much like anything else on earth, either.

We turn south on Highway 285 for a two-hour drive to see what lies under all that desert. Carlsbad Caverns came to attention in 1898, when Jim White, a teenage ranch hand, saw what he thought was smoke rising from the earth. It was actually a swarm of bats streaming out of the cavern. During summer sunsets, as many as a half-million Mexican free-tailed bats--each able to eat half its weight in insects in a night--come out to hunt.

With 50 or so other people, we sit by the cave entrance, listen to the free ranger talk, and wait. Quite suddenly, the air is alive with bats that pour from the cavern mouth for 45 minutes, a black ribbon stretching miles into the sky. Lynn and I beam like kids at Christmas.

We decide to spend the night in Carlsbad, which is actually 25 miles from the caverns. A closer town, White's City, is really just a souvenir shop and a hotel that is slightly pricey due to its proximity.