Wednesday, April 1, 2015 In To Arizona!

For some reason, I woke up very early so I messed around with creating the GPS maps on the previous post, while trying hard to not wake Ellen up.  She did, but then she cooked bacon & eggs for breakfast.  We packed up and left early headed for the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.  On the way we passed the Continental Divide just before Gallup, NM.  Ellen spit on one side and I spit on the other:  One will get to the Pacific faster than the other one gets to the Atlantic....

It was a longer run than we planned so we got to the park just in time to take in the visitor center and then have lunch in the camper.

Looking out over the Painted Desert

The Petrified Forest is just a small part of the “Painted Desert” area that stretches from the Grand Canyon area back into New Mexico where we were last night.  Its geological heritage dates back 250 million years, when it was located in a sub-tropical area a lot south of where it is now…..  There were trees over 200 feet tall.  Huge lakes and then rivers formed that eroded the land and these trees fell and were swept hundreds/thousands of miles downstream where they became waterlogged and sank.  They were covered by soil, ash, and minerals and were preserved as they became petrified.  As the soil has eroded and the Colorado plateau has risen, they are now visible.  They break up into pieces because they’re really stone and minerals now and they fracture into pieces as the ground erodes away from their support.

A restored house that was originally built 700 to 1,000 years ago from pieces of petrified wood.

The Historic Route 66 hardly exists in eastern Arizona.  I-40 pretty much replaced all of it.  We did find pieces of it in Holbrook and Winslow (where we did stand on the corner….)

Old Route 66 did pass through the National park and it's memorialized with an old Studebaker.....

We followed the old route into Flagstaff and found an nice KOA campground for the night.