Our 2018 Berning Family Vacation has officially kicked off!
We left early, early, early, Sunday morning. Mark and I got up at 3:00, got up and ready, filled up the cooler, got the kiddos in the car and pulled out at 3:30. We thought we would have a solid three or four hours of kiddos sleeping in our future, but nope…no sleeping. Seriously. They were all wide eyed and ready to get to TEXAS! We hadn’t even gotten out of town before I hear Sarah whisper, “Are we in Texas?!” Nope. No we are not.
The kiddos stayed awake the ENTIRE day. Benjamin luckily slept a little on and off (and was easily the happiest of all three kiddos!) but the two big kids…not a wink.
We plugged along nicely though. We prepped all of our food the night before and so we only stopped for gas and potty breaks and ate in the car. In other news, the car is a DISASTER…
BUT we made it to Capulin Volcano National Monument an hour and a half ahead of our goal and that was a WIN! It was super cold and windy but it felt so good to stretch our legs and learn something new.
We first stopped at the visitor center (which I will always recommend doing FIRST whenever visiting a national anything). It helped give the kids some background about what we were going to be seeing and we learned some new things from the rangers.
We drove up the road to the top of the crater and hiked down the Crater Vent Trail. This was an easy 0.4 mile trail that was paved and led to the bottom of the Capulin crater. This was perfect for the kids to RUN and get out some of their wiggles. And the view at the top of the crater was amazing!
We didn’t want to linger too long because this was definitely just a travel day but I am definitely glad we made the stop. If we had had longer I would have loved to have walked around the rim of the crater (which is a 1 mile loop) but I still felt like we had a good experience. I definitely feel like a half a day is the most I would need to spend here – it’s a pretty small monument but still worth the stop!
We hit the road again and pulled into Dalhart, Texas for the night!
