Petrified Forest and Painted Desert

We left Phoenix this morning after I made french toast for breakfast. It made me realize how long it had been since i'd cooked. It was such a great break, that it was actually nice to cook again. We drove for several hours and stopped at a rest area for lunch. We were glad we decided to eat when we did because the next rest area was 123 miles away. There was a lot of, shall we say, open spaces today. It was amazing to be able to see so far that we watched storms with lightening while we were in the shining sun. We also got to see several dust devils while we were driving in Arizona. Those were really cool to see too.

 After a while these cacti developed personalities. Especially the ones with two arms. This one had an arm stolen by a coyote and he's kind of sad about it. He plots how to poke the coyote if he comes around again.

 Then you get to sections where you can envision the group dynamics if they were a crowd of people. The ones with lots of tall sections are rastafarians :) or maybe it's just too much time looking at desert that gives one an active imagination....

 This was one of the storms we were watching. Not sure if you can tell or not, but the closer clouds were actually pink on the bottom from reflecting the red desert dirt.

 We stopped by the Petrified Forest and it turned out to be very cool. These trees don't just turn into any kind of rock. they turn into pretty rocks.

 We were surprised by the colors.

 It's a tree, no it's a rock, no it's a rock that used to be a tree. crazy cool stuff.

 Hey Dad, I'm still super cute. You know you want me in that picture.

We also got to see the Painted Desert. The rock layers were just beautiful.

 We actually had really great weather for our visit. A storm was coming so it wasn't super hot.

 Well, then we drove on to see a 600 year old indian village and we were closer to the storm. The wind really picked up then. It was actually chilly, but we ran and saw what we wanted to see. It was very interesting.

 these drawings were on the rocks next to the village.

After that we drove through some rain, stopped at the visitors center so the twins could get their Jr. Ranger badges, and drove to Galllup, New Mexico. We ate at a local mexican restaurant on Route 66 because we felt that we had to have some good mexican food in New Mexico, although we did pass a Taco Bell to get there :) then we crashed in our hotel room and watched HGTV till we could watch no more. Tomorrow we head to a Lake north of Amarillo, TX and begin the last leg of camping to get us home. See you all soon!