Basically, the park consists of a 30 mile loop that starts at the Painted Desert. Every mile or so is a turn-out to take photos and look at the rocks. The last 10 miles or so are the petrified trees.
The first few stops were at the Painted Desert side. Here you can see our group photo at a lookout.
About this time, Acacia latched on to our small Canon PowerShot camera and started taking photos. Here's one of her self portraits in the Painted Desert.
We drove around to the south side of the park, and after a short lunch break consisting of some delicious Minnesota Summer Sausage, we wound up at the Petrified forest.
These logs are quite amazing. They feel like solid rock, and have some very deep and rich colors.
Next we drove down I-40 to the Meteor Crater. That was an interesting place to visit, even after paying the $30 for the two adults to get in. The crater was absolutely huge, and there was a pretty good climb just to get to the top of the rim. They no longer allow people to actually go inside the crater, but that was fine with me - it must have been several hundred feet deep.
There was a "documentary" being shot there, and it was immediately clear who the star of the show was. You could hear some clanking has he walked up, and when you looked up there was a man literally dressed in a suit made of mirrors. None of the workers really knew what the subject matter that he was documenting, but he sure attracted a lot of attention.
They were doing some amateur style video, and some higher-end still photography using the old light box style cameras (the ones you have to put a sheet over your head to see through).
We made it into Phoenix around 6:30 tonight. The kids were restless and hungry, but lucky for us, David has a Chucky-Cheeses about 2 blocks from his house, so we went there for dinner. It worked out well, and I think we'll all sleep good tonight.
And tomorrow, we plan on getting up reasonably early and heading out to Wickenburg to look for gold.
3 comments:
Do they still have a ton of Amethyst Geodes there? I remember taking one home from the gift shop. How about the space capsule?
They had a lot of Geodes and other minerals both at the Forest and the Crater, although I didn't pay any attention if they were actually native to the area.
There was a capsule at the Crater, which as I recall was a prototype for the Apollo program.
So good......
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