July 28, 2013 - Sunday

We left the Williams KOA and headed east. Chris reserved a site in the Albuquerque KOA for us tonight and there were a few stops we wanted to make along the way. Route 66 was our general route. Since a lot of 66 has been demolished and 40 became the major interstate, we took 40 and got off anywhere we saw a “Historic Route 66” sign. We stopped to see the Meteor Crater and read about how it was formed. The hole left in the ground was pretty impressive. There were many neat towns with cheesy route 66 gift shops and neon signs. One town had wig-wams you could rent out to sleep in, too.  Of course we had to stop and stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona. :-)

The Petrified Forest National Park was our first big stop. What happened to the trees was an interesting process but the park itself was kind of drab. I mean, how long can you look at a rock? I can’t remember exactly how many, but years and years ago these trees were covered in silt and rocky material and over time(thousands of years) the rock infiltrated the tree and basically left a rock tree and there is no wood left but it still has the shape of a tree. When it’s polished, it’s really pretty and you can still see the rings in some of the trees. We saw The Painted Desert after visiting The Petrified Forest. The desert was really pretty with all different colors streaking through the rock. In order to make up time, we did not stop at this visitor center, since we could drive right through the park and see everything. We also passed through an interesting thunderstorm. It’s different out here because oftentimes you can see where the storm starts and where it stops. We watched the storm move across New Mexico miles before we actually went through it.

Right before we got to Albuquerque, we stopped at a Mexican/Indian store that was highly advertised on billboards along 40. There were actually a lot of Mexican and Native American gifts in the shop, and surprised us with all the neat things they had.

We arrived in Albuquerque after eating New Mexican cuisine at Sadie’s in old city Albuquerque. Everything was spicy and we did not realize until after that New Mexico serves an interesting mix of regional food that is almost always served with red or green chili peppers-now it all makes sense. We love spicy, but it got to be a lot after several bites of spice. The servings were huge and neither of us finished ½ of our meals. I was happy to try food here and experience a completely different taste with influences from Native American, cowboy chuckwagon, Spanish, Mexican and Mediterranean.

When we got to the KOA we left everything hooked up and went to bed so we did not have to hook everything back up tomorrow.