You will want a car
This is the least glamorous page on the site and possibly the most useful. Roswell is a driving town, the house is on a residential street rather than downtown, and almost everything worth seeing in this part of New Mexico is measured in tens of miles.
Parking at the house
Free parking on the premises, on a wide concrete driveway at the front leading to a two-car garage. There is no permit, no meter and no shared lot. Beyond the side gate there is a graveled strip used for RV parking, which also happily takes a boat trailer or a second vehicle.
After a week of hotel parking charges, this is a bigger relief than it sounds.
Distances, honestly stated
The house sits in an established residential neighborhood roughly fifteen minutes’ drive from downtown Roswell and the UFO Museum. We give that as a drive time rather than a mileage on purpose: the exact address of an occupied rental is not published, and a precise distance from it would be a precise location.
Distances that are published, and that we can therefore state properly:
- Bottomless Lakes State Park — 15 miles southeast of Roswell, about a twenty-minute drive. That figure is New Mexico State Parks’ own.
- Carlsbad Caverns National Park — 103 miles from Roswell, per the National Park Service’s own driving-distance table. Call it a two-hour drive each way, and treat it as a full day rather than an afternoon.
Everything else in town — supermarkets, restaurants, the museums — is a ten-to-twenty-minute drive. Roswell is laid out on a grid around Main Street and it is an easy town to drive in, with the kind of parking that stopped existing in most American cities thirty years ago.
Checked 16 August 2026. Hours, prices and dates change — confirm with New Mexico State Parks and the National Park Service before you go.
Arriving without a car
It is possible, and we would not recommend it. Roswell has no meaningful public transport network for a visitor, taxis and rideshare are thin outside peak hours, and a stay built around them will be frustrating rather than adventurous.
If you are flying in, Roswell Air Center (airport code ROW) is the city’s commercial airport. Routes and on-site car rental change, so check both directly with the airport and the airlines when you book rather than trusting a travel page — including this one. Getting to Roswell covers the arrival options in more detail.
A practical middle path: rent at the airport for the days you want to range out to the lakes or further afield, and stay put on the others. The garden at the house is genuinely somewhere you can spend a day.