Petrified Forest and Painted Desert

Hello,

We left Flagstaff on a mission: to visit Petrified Forest State Park and the Painted Desert, on our way to leaving Arizona and returning to New Mexico. We even neglected Route 66 attractions such as Winslow Arizona with the opportunity to have a photo with the girl in the flat bed Ford.

Rockified tree trunks and broken off bits litter the ground. The colours are lovely.

Another one of those 'alien landscape' days. There was  a road closure on the Park road so we lost most of an hour backtracking and missed some of the Petrified Forest areas. But nevertheless we were not disappointed.

The subtleties of the colours in the Painted Desert are hard to capture but the otherworldly feelings do not go away.

 The next pictures are from the Blue Mesa badlands.

Newspaper Rock is fascinating, with its dense record of messages from ages ago.

Any of the sites we have visited on this trip warranted days or weeks spent exploring them. Maybe another time... We headed down the highway, dodging the signs to attractions of Route 66 (a more recent cultural relic).

I would never tire of the marvellous variety in the New Mexico landscape, the sky at sunrise and sunset, and the cloud formations over the mountains, in between. The moon is just barely shy of full and hangs in the sky like a fruit that we should be able to reach up and grasp.

Once in New Mexico I decided that I wanted to detour down to Roswell just to try and tour the Area. Two hours later we found ourselves back on the I-40 headed toward Albuquerque. We have no recollection of visiting Roswell. Very strange.


Tomorrow we hope to have better luck visiting Petroglyph National Monument (just a few miles away).

I also hope to continue the hunt for hot peppers (there are many varieties in huge quantities in the supermarkets... I was hoping for something special like a festival, but it's not the right season). I think I am in the right place though:

Then on to Amarillo, Texas, and maybe the Cadillac Ranch and the Quarter Horse Hall of Fame and Museum. 

We'll see what happens,

stay tuned,
j