After doing our laundry and a little more r&r in Tucson, we were off to Hatch, New Mexico, the Chile Capital of the World.
On the way there, we planned to stop somewhere and as usual have a picnic lunch. As we were driving east on I-10, we saw a sign for Colossal Cave Mountain Park and pulled right in.
It is huge, and not all about the cave. It has camping and plenty of picnic areas, among other things. Here we are at an area in El Bosquecito (the little forest), inside the park.
The cave tour was great, too. Colossal Cave is a dry cave - there's no more water flowing in it so no more features are being created, like stalagtites and stalagmites. The thing that stuck in the kids' heads was the story of robbers that hid out with their gold in the cave until they were starved out by the authorities, but the gold was never recovered. The story is that after serving time in Yuma prison, one of the robbers came back and made off with the gold that had been hidden there.
After the tour, we hopped back in the car to head for Hatch, New Mexico. We picked it as a goal based partly on seeing an episode of Anthony Bourdain's travel show, Hatch is the chile pepper capital of the world, and we had our hearts set on nice enchiladas or chiles rellenos. The plan was to drive up to Hatch and then down to Las Cruces, where we had a hotel room waiting.
The problem is that Hatch closes at 7pm (plus we lost an hour because, in the summer, 6pm in Arizona is 7pm in New Mexico). Actually, there were three restaurants still open - one dive, one chain restaurant (which were not allowed according to our agreed-upon rules of the trip), and this place - Burgers and More. From the parking lot it looked like we'd just be eating burgers and fries, but fortunately they had some nice options, including a tortilla burger (burger filling but in a tortilla - Vernon had one with the optional green chile added in) and both red and green chile fries. The red chile fries were outstanding, and the green chile fries probably would have been, but they had run out of nacho cheese to put on them (we ordered them anyway).
The kids were happy to get corn dogs.
While we were there, they locked the doors - even the night owl places in Hatch close at 8pm.