After waking up in New Mexico and enjoying a (lackluster) complimentary Econo-lodge breakfast, we got back on the open road and headed towards Arizona. Between the two states lies The Continental Divide, which is a tiny souvenir shack nestled up against the highway, which overlooks a giant, thousand-mile-wide gulch. It's somewhat scenic, so we decided to capture the moment on something more substantial than an iphone camera.
I wanted to ask the little old lady in blueblockers to take a picture of us, but Jaime discouraged me because he is an independent and proud man who needs help from no one.
However, I felt long overdue for all the jillions of photos I take for tourists at the parks, so I asked anyway. She smiled and stretched out a liverspotted arthritic hand to take the camera from me, and pulled her blueblockers down revealing an eyepatch and cataracts the size of a fist. Awesome. She couldn't see well enough to take a picture, but bless her heart she tried. And Jaime mocked me for the next 23 miles.
We drove through Arizona, and the terrain became less plains-y and more deserty. Then the sand started taking on colors, and striations appeared in the cliffs in the distance. Jaime and I started talking about the "Painted Desert," and how we wondered where it was.
"Painted Desert/Petrified Forest- 45 mi." said a road sign.
And so we went!
Driving up, the Petrified Forest National Park doesn't seem that cool. We hadn't had lunch, so we ate at the little cafeteria. I had a Navajo Taco, which is a cornmeal pancake with ground beef, cheese, tomatoes, and puke piked on top of it. Jay had a burger.
Then, just to be ironic, we both got ice cream. In the desert. "Suck it, geographical limitations! It's 2009 and we are eating ice cream in the desert! Yeahhhhh!" (This was my inner monologue.
Then we paid our $10 and headed into the Park. There's a stretch of road about 30 miles long that you drive through, and periodically it's obscenely picturesque, so you get out and take some photos and poke around. It looks like Mars at some places- just an endless landscape of red and pink rocks and hills and cliffs and mountains. Well worth the price of admission- but it gets better: at one point, we got out to poke around, and we discovered bits of crystals on the ground. Like, ALL over the ground. Once we knew what we were looking for, we could see shiny objects everywhere! They were bits of sand that had been cooked and had become silica again- shiny and gorgeous and rough- picking them up, they looked like a cluster of small skyscrapers in your palm- an infinitesimal silver city. So cool.
You can't take anything out of the park, so we left them there, but they were absolutely gorgeous- like a really cool "surprise!" from Mother Nature when you thought you'd seen all her tricks.
We drove on, and found a line of telephone poles marching across the park. There was no road to accompany them, just the poles- rough, time-battered pine with the old school glass housing for the electrical parts on top. There was no wire either. We found out later that these used to run alongside the original route 66, and the desert had obliterated the remains of the road here. Trippy. (This was foreshadowing for things to come, with me...)
We saw a prairie dog! He was polite enough to wait for us to back the car up so Jay could take a glance, too, before scampering off and vanishing down a hole. Such a stereotype, but it's true- they totally scamper and disappear down holes.
We saw pretty purple flowers blooming on cacti, and then we got to Newspaper Rock.
This is a large canyon with petroglyphs carved into it. Petroglyphs are little pictorials made by people a long, long time ago. Like the 70's.
We stood on an overlook and used telescopes to peer into the canyon where some native was clearly restless. He drew people, dogs, lizards, antelope, gods, rain, food- everything that he saw. It's hard work to carve something into a rock, and I wish I could know what he (or they) wanted to tell us. The whole point of taking the time to make something Forever is so it'll be there after you're gone. If his message was, "we were here and this is what our life is like," then that's cool. It's actually kind of what I'm doing right this very moment.
In an over-the-top metaphor, while we were at Newspaper Rock, some giant ravens were flapping around below, and 'caw-ing.' Their bird noises reverberated off the petroglyph-covered rocks, making me think about an echo. The ghost of a sound while we stared at the ghost of a life. Pretty cool.
Then we arrived at the Crystal Forest, which was not nearly what I expected. I thought "crystals," like the pretty ones from earlier, but I was wrong. These are the remains of a forest that was covered by the planed a bajillion years ago, and being compressed underground made the wood turn into amethyst and quartz and jade and stuff. But it all kind of looks brownish-gray, and these somewhat cyllindrical rock things on the ground were trees. It's all well and good, but if you're going to hype something as The Crystal Forest to a girl who grew up with My Little Ponies, there better be some goddamn shiny jewel things everywhere. And butterflies, dammit.
There was, however, the teeniest, tiniest little bunny ever. We're talking teacup-sized. He popped out of a hole to be cute and we took some pictures. Then his set time was up and he went on break. He did not sign my autograph book.
After strolling though the land of grayish-brown cyllindrical rock things, we headed out of the park and met up with 66 again. The part that was above-ground, and not buried by layers of earth. The next Thing To See was a GIANT METEOR CRATER, and we couldn't wai
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