A walk in the woods?

Painted Desert - Arizona

Painted Desert - Arizona

Friday, April 1, 2005
We took off from Flagstaff early in the morning and headed for the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert. After about a 2-hour drive, we arrived at the entrance to the Petrified Forest and stopped at the gift shop there, where I bought some geodes and had them cut. We continued on to the visitor center/museum, and, since they had a wheelchair we could borrow, I decided to push Aunt Rose around the loop through the petrified logs, which would have been fine if there hadn't been stairs involved. Every time we came to a set of stairs, she would get out of the chair and walk up or down, while I followed with the wheelchair. Very interesting... I wasn 't all that impressed with the Petrified Forest - maybe because to me, they just looked like a bunch of trees, and having lived in Michigan all my life, I've seen lots of trees. :) The Painted Desert, however, more than made up for any disappointment I may have had with the forest. The pictures above can't really do justice to how beautiful it really is. A sign there said that the Painted Desert has some of the clearest air in the nation, and I can believe it - at one point, I could see all the way to the San Francisco peaks near Flagstaff, which were 120 miles away!

After leaving the park, we began our long, long journey north. Because much of northeastern Arizona is reservation land, there's not always a town close by. We drove about 2.5 hours and had crossed into Utah before we found a restaurant to stop at. After dinner, we continued for about another 2 hours before finally hitting Moab and our beds. All in all, it was a day with lots of driving, but well worth it for what we saw. Tomorrow, Arches National Park.

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