Friday, May 13, 2011

Bears Across America: Desert Rocks

 Friday April 22nd.  Our travels westward took us from Albuquerque New Mexico to Flagstaff Arizona.

We expected it to be a fairly low-interest day, but it turned out to be much better than I expected.

We started the day by visiting two National Parks:  The Painted Desert, and Petrified Forest.  When you pull up to the park all you see is incredibly boring old featureless desert, however a mile into the park the land suddenly drops and some of the most magnificent desert landscape I have ever seen exposes itself in front of you.  The colours - reds and browns, are amazing.
The petrified forests are also cool.  Miles and miles of stone that looks like wood.  I am positive that some of the wood is still actually wood.

Some of the best bits abouts the petrified wood is the extensive amount of crystals that have formed inside the logs.

After the parks, we headed further west and did some caching.  One of the first caches was at the Wig Wam Inn in Holbrook AZ, which was the inspiration for the hotel in Cars.

We then headed to Winslow Arizona and stood on the corner.  It was made famous by the Eagles song  "Takin It Easy"

"Well, I'm a standing on a corner 
in Winslow Arizona
It's such a fine sight to see
It's a girl, my Lord, 

in a flatbed Ford 
slowin' down to take a look at me
Come on, baby, don't say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is
gonna save me
We may lose and we may win though
we will never be here again
so open up, I'm climbin' in,
so take it easy..."



We finished our day by visiting the largest meteor impact crater in the world.  Miles across, and 450ft deep.  It is definitely a big hole.

Oh, and somewhere along the way I ended up riding a giant bunny... because why not?