First of all, let me say I am behind because night before last we didn't have an internet connection, and last night I just wanted a break. So here's the catch-up...
We got an early start on Day 8 to make up for the day before. We pulled out of the RV park at 7:30AM and went across the street to the doughnut shop to pick up a quick breakfast. The doughnuts were some of the best and freshest we've ever had. We quickly made our way across the Arizona border to our first tourist stop of the day - the Petrified Forest National Monument, also the site of the Painted Desert. The desert was breathtaking - the sheer vastness, the colors, the rock formations. But the best part for me was the interaction of the petrified wood with its landscape. Let me just say, my heart skips a beat for petrified wood. There was petrified wood scattered everywhere! Some were pieces and some were entire logs. It was truly amazing to see.
A History... 225 million years ago, the area was a floodplain where conifer trees lived in abundance. When the trees fell, flooded streams washed them into the floodplains, and "a mix of silt, mud and volcanic ash buried the logs. This sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs' decay. Silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood" (from the park's brochure). As the continental plates shifted, this region was uplifted, and this the tropical environment became today's grassland. As weathering of the land has occurred, the petrified wood (as well as fossilized plants and animals) have been exposed.
The park only contains 10% of the wood in the Petrified Forest, so on our way out, we stopped in the gift shop to get a few souvenir pieces. As we drove into the next town, Holbrook, AZ, we saw a shop specializing in the sale of petrified wood, and our attention was piqued by the acres of petrified logs surrounding their parking lot. We had to stop. This was the rock shop of all rock shops. It trumped everything in my rock collecting history. Not only did they have shelf after shelf and bin and bin of every rock and fossil (even some quite beautiful dinosaur poop) you could ever imagine for sale, but they also had a display case that I could have spent the entire day in front of. I picked up a few more things here, including a small piece of petrified wood from Madagascar, and though I was tempted by the dinosaur poop, we went on into Holbrook to find lunch.
We had some burgers from Joe & Aggie's Cafe, an old Route 66 stop. The people here were really nice and, once they found out we were traveling the old route, had lots of suggestions for us. I bought a few postcards here that were sketched by the man who inspired the VW bus character in "Cars." The guy behind the counter said he was quite the kooky hippie. I don't know, but the postcards were pretty cool, but I do tend to like kooky hippies. We also browsed a few shops in Holbrook, hearing tales from more locals, and we made a quick pass of the town museum. On the way out of town, we passed the Wigwam Motel. I had really wanted to spend the night in one of these concrete tepees, but it just wasn't in the cards for that day. We had to keep making our way westward.
Our next stop on the Route was Winslow, AZ, made famous by the Eagle's song "Take It Easy." We did stop at the legendary corner - 2nd Steet and Kinsley - and my dad bought himself a T-shirt along with more Route 66 memorabilia. I bought a few plastic bears of local honey, gathered by a local railroader/beekeeper. I'm signing up for a beekeeping class next month, so lately my interest in honey varieties has grown.
Our last sightseeing expedition for the day was at Meteor Crater, where 50,000 years ago a meteor traveling 33,000 miles per hour crashed into the Earth, creating a hole 570 feet deep, almost a mile wide, and 3 miles in circumference. Pretty freaking big! There was a fairly large chunk of the meteor on the display inside the exhibits, but about 80% of it vaporized on impact. Still though, all plant and animal life within a 100-mile radius was destroyed as nearly a half-billion tons of rock were gouged from the earth and showered the area. Astronauts did some of their training here in preparation for the moon landing, and some skeptics believe the lunar expeditions were actually filmed on this site.
From here, we had to make our way on in to Flagstaff, which was supposed to be our resting place for the night. But as we drove, we could see dense clouds looming on the horizon, and as we got further into Flagstaff, we learned more of the seriousness of the weather situation. We drove into snow showers as we entered town and came upon a mountain so big, it startled me. The white clouds were so enveloping and low-hanging that there was no warning there was a snow-covered mountain this large ahead! We stopped at the airport to pick up my rental car so that we could split up for the next few days and could hardly find a place to park Rocinante, the snow banks were so massive! So we got the car and kept driving west, trying to get out of the storm and the six inches that were predicted to fall overnight. First, we tried Williams, but the snow was still falling pretty hard, and the office staff at the campground suggested we drive on to Ash Ford. So we did. Despite the lack of a sign, we found a ghetto RV park behind a motel (sans internet) and parked for the night. But as we parked the rental outside the Ranch House Cafe for dinner, the snow started coming down... and kept coming. We ended up with about 4 inches by morning, and they closed the interstate down east of us, between Ash Ford and Flagstaff. We definitely had made the right decision to keep driving.
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