4 1/2 months ago, I visited Carlsbad Caverns for the first time while on our family road trip to the Grand Canyon. Carlsbad Caverns was kind of the antithesis of the Grand Canyon. The GRAND Canyon? Nobody misses that. You can't go through that part of the country whether by covered wagon or jet plane and miss the fact that there's a HUGE canyon there. You just can't. I mean, you can see it from space, right?? But Carlsbad Caverns is so out of the way, out in the middle of nowhere, barely accessible by modern roads (okay, I exaggerate) that you could completely miss it. The most you would have seen (before they built it up as a national monument, that is) was a yawning hole in the side of the earth and you maybe would have thought to yourself, "wow, that's a neat looking cave." But go down inside and it's a completely different world down there. And pitch black, if not for the modern miracle of electricity. Looking back t