Carlsbad and the Living Desert

Sometime before Christmas, we were visited in America by Pinky's sister and her friend. They had been traveling around California, and wanted to meet up with us for a road trip through the American Southwest. On the day that they landed, we took them to dinner at Campo Verde, an Arlington institution and the coolest place to see tacky Christmas lights in the city.

It was a hit! In the words of Pinky's sister, it was the "best restaurant ever!"

The next morning, we set out on our long road trip to New Mexico.

It was cold out in the desert. Very, very cold! In fact, on the day that we departed from Texas, the air was so freezing that we had to fill up the air in our tires and scrape the ice off of the windshield of the rental car. Now that's something I haven't had to deal with in the past six years!

We stayed overnight in Carlsbad, New Mexico. It's a town that has grown on me over the past few years. Carlsbad Caverns National Park is one of the coolest sites in the country (in my humble opinion) and I was thrilled to introduce it to our international visitors who had come all the way from Thailand to visit the Chihuahuan Desert with me.

Fortunately, it was relatively warm in the Caverns. Carlsbad maintains a perpetually comfortable temperature of around 60-something F. It feels a little chilly in the summer, but in the winter, it was positively toasty down in the caverns.

In the afternoon, after we left the national park, we paid a visit to the Living Desert State Park in Carlsbad city. The often-overlooked state park is home of the Living Desert Zoo, which I had never seen before. We arrived in the early afternoon, paid our $5 entry fee, and followed the map through the botanical gardens and zoo. It was a weekday, and we had the whole place to ourselves.

As it turns out, the Living Desert State Park is a zoo and botanical garden dedicated to the native flora and fauna of the Chihuahuan Desert of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. As such, all of the animals and plants on display are natives to the region. Every exhibit was designed to use the indigenous landscape. We got the chance to see bald eagles, harpy eagles, roadrunners, mountain lions, bobcats, wild javelinas, prairie dogs, wolves, bison, and more!

Towards the end of the walking tour, we got to visit a greenhouse full of cacti and desert succulents. It was really interesting! Even though I'm from the American South, I don't know so much about the desert. Over the past few years, I've been more and more interested in visiting the southwest. I'm not sure exactly why that is. Perhaps, after living for six years surrounded by the beaches and jungles of southeast Asia, I'm attracted to the desert since it's different from what I normally see. In any case, I'm so glad to get to experience something new in such a rugged and beautifully desolate landscape. The desert is alive... more alive than most people probably realize!

Learn more: Living Desert Zoo (from the USA travel blog Roadrunner America)