Day 11: The Petrified Forest (pics to come)

Our first night in a Walmart parking lot didn't go so bad. At least we knew where our toilet stop was in the morning. We slept in a little then headed East along the I40 for the Petrified Forest National Park. The excellent thing is that along the way we are still able to drive along parts of Route 66 as we go along. That will all end by the time we get to Texas. There the road will head North for Chicago, and we will head South for Houston, so we will make the most of it while we can and drive through every section we see signs for (because as I mentioned earlier, the route isn't necessarily shown on maps anymore).

One of the towns we came across was Winslow, Arizona. Right now you are freaking out, I know. Winslow, Arizona! Like that one line from that one Eagles song, “Takin' it Easy”! The lady in the vistors centre seemed a little offended that I couldn't quite remember that line, but she told me hundreds of Eagles fans come every year to be “Standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona”. They had a guitar signed by Eagles and a statue of a guy with a guitar standing on the actual corner. Now I might be sounding a little sarcastic about all of this, but that's only because it's sad that it seems like little towns along the 66 are having to cling to things like this. Surely there is a way, at a national level, to revive Route 66. Make it the thing to do for tourists who come here. Giving them discounts for driving in hybrids or something. There is so much history on this road, it's a shame to see it falling apart. It's the strong and innocent America that the rest of the world wants to see again. But maybe you can't put that genie back in it's bottle.

Anyway, so we arrived at the Petrified Forest and payed our $10 entry. If we go into one more National Park we can convert to an Annual Pass (we've been saving the reciepts), which will mean no more entry fees. We entered at the Southern end, and checked out the museum. They had some very old dinosaur and pre-dinosaur bones. It turns out that millions of years ago this whole area was near the equator, wet and tropical, and over time lots of trees ended up in a floodplain where they were eventually covered by silt. Over time silica leeched into the trees structure and solidified, turning them to stone. Even more millions of years later, the stone around them eroded, and they were exposed once again. Some of these trees are 5 metres long, and weight something like 30 tonnes. They have some beatiful marble-like patterns inside.

We continued on and stopped at a couple more trails within the forest to take a look. Unfortunatley, many of the better specimins have been pilfered from the park over the years, meaning that places like Crystal Forest were not nearly as impressive as we imagined. It looked like the bones of time laying for eternity as the world around them changed, but they stayed the same. Frozen.

We continued through the park and saw some of the Painted Desert. The contrast between the different strata on the rocks was amazing; red, white, yellow, orange, brown. It's hard to imagine how some of these feautures stayed standing while the ground around it erroded away, but it it did.

After leaving the park, we continued East. Before we knew it, and with little fanfare, we had left Arizona and entered New Mexico. We didn't want to drive all the way to Albuquerque that night, so we stopped at the Walmart in Gallup. It's so much easier when you don't have to drive around looking for a nice quiet street to park in. Just a corner of a parking lot will do. We did have some trouble figuring out the time though. In Australia, when you change time zones there are signs on the side of the road telling you how it's changed. Not here, it's a local secret.