My husband woke us up before daylight to get on the road. He’s eager to get started so nixes my idea for an in camp breakfast. We head out and attempt to locate another Denny’s. Maggie had us doing U turns in places there weren’t any. Besides, U turns with a 30 foot travel trailer isn’t exactly something my husband is fond of performing.
Eventually, we got the rig facing east and stumbled across a trucker’s plaza that featured a coffee shop and a restaurant. There was not any available seating in the restaurant and we were directed to the coffee shop. Any other time, I’d be aggravated but I was pleasantly pleased to see a big screen TV in the coffee shop which was already tuned in to the Backyardigans! The girls were excited to see something familiar and promptly sat down in the big comfy chair to veg out to Pablo and Uniqua until we were served breakfast.
Resuming our drive, we headed out toward Meteor City, AZ. My husband had somehow allowed a housefly to enter the truck. He swatted at it, missed, allowed Kyle to swat at it, he missed too, and finally said, “Roll all the windows down!” We managed to avoid the fly catastrophe and safely continue our drive to Meteor Crater.
This was a really neat stop. This 150 ft, multi-ton, extremely dense, iron/nickel meteor struck the earth about 50,000 years ago with a force 1,000 times greater than the atomic bomb that struck Hiroshima. When the meteor struck the Earth, it was traveling at 11 miles per second. Upon impact, the meteor was obliterated into tiny microscopic fragments. The only measurable fragments are those that broke off before impact and this accounts for less than 1% of the actual size of the meteor. Really cool place to visit!! This pic shows the largest discovered meteorite fragment of the meteor that created Meteor Crater.
This picture shows Meteor Crater. But......
If you zoom in a bit you can see where the scientists had drilled holes to get samples, etc. and......
Zooming in a little more shows a 6 foot plywood astronaut on the fence of the sample boring area. The flag is also plywood and measure 3 x 6 feet. Isn't that something?
After gaping at the hole for a while, we continued our travels east. The next stop planned was Winslow, AZ where I wanted to get a picture with the guy that’s standing on the corner. DH had agreed to do this just for me. It’s another virtual geo and I needed to collect some information. Unfortunately for me, this particular area is under construction resulting in more traffic. As we approached the corner, DH needed to find a place to pull off the road and park the trailer. We finally found a spot and The Teen and myself got out of the truck to walk to the corner.
Returning to the truck, I told DH that I needed one more stop for another geo. He snarled but said okay. I should have looked around a little bit before making him move the rig. After the fact, I discovered I only needed to go a short walk away from our current location. Needless to say, he was not a happy camper. We returned to I-40 E (a.k.a. Historic Route 66) and began a nice little drive to the Petrified Forest National Park.
This intriguing park boasts an amazing display of colorful hills made out of clay which was deposited in this area about 225 million years ago! After continuous erosion, the soft sandstone revealed many fossilized organisms from the Triassic period of the Mesozoic (when the dinosaur era was just beginning). The petrified logs, still abundant in the park, are remains of trees from a huge flooded forest. At that time, the logs' wood tissue were filled by a silica-rich water which combined with oxygen replaced their organic matter by crystals of quartz. They've got all the looks of wooden logs but are truly made of hard rock!
This is the reason why it's call the Crystal Forest. The inside of the tree trunk has turned into colorful crystals.
What a fantastic place this is! The rig was dwarfed by the size of the colorful clay hills which are so soft and have been exposed to so much erosion I can't imagine how tall they must have been. The petrified logs are beautiful and so intriguing - even after reading the scientific explanation, I still keep asking myself: are these pieces of wood that feel like rock to the touch or are they real rocks that for some reason resemble tree logs so much? Providing a curious show, some logs still lie on the edge of cliffs, some start to come out of the ground as the rain washes down the clay, lots of them tumbled down to the desert floor where they lie in all imaginable arrangements and positions, delicate desert flowers growing here and there among them.
Fragments of petrified logs scatter the area. The ones that come from the bark or the outer part of the logs look so precious. They are remains of a distant, fascinating past. I took as many pictures as I could but what I really want is them to make an imprint in my memory so that when I am 79 and close my eyes in bed I can remember myself walking amongst the awesome 225 million years old petrified logs!
Along the Park Drive, one sort of slides from the Petrified Forest into the Painted Desert. “Painted Desert” is the poetic name given to a huge sweep of Chinle Group rocks that show a variety of colors from different minerals in the rock. The distinct white layers are sandstone. The cap of the Tepees is clay. Dark layers are caused by high carbon content. Darker reds are iron-stained sandstone. Reddish bases are stained by iron-oxide, which is also called hematite. The mixed reds, grays, whites, and blacks of the different rock layers combine to produce something that really looks like the result of an artist gone berserk with some REALLY BIG paint brushes. It’s like this everywhere you look in this part of the park.
Kangaroo tries to explain about her favorite part of the desert.
I’ve always heard that though it’s hot here, it’s a “different” kind of hot. The wind is always blowing. The thermostat in the truck was showing 99 degrees Fahrenheit but it really didn’t feel that hot!
