Petrified Forest National Park & Painted Desert

Before heading down to Sedona we decided to stop off at the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park, located just off of Highway 40 near the AZ and NM border.

Painted Desert

The lovely Painted Desert Inn,  renovated by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 30's.

 

This old car marks where Old Route 66 used to run, close to the north part of the Petrified Forest National Park

Puerco Pueblo- A partially stabilized 100 room village built between 1250 and 1380 and may have housed nearly 200 people. A short paved trail through the site offers wayside exhibits and views of petroglyphs

Look closely and you can see some of the petroglyphs.

Grant attempts to catch a desert lizard!

The 'Teepees'- layered blues, purples and grays created by iron, carbon, manganese and other minerals standing in a cone-formation.

They created an almost other-world landscape

Breathtaking!

 

 

Flood waters washed out the arroyo, or gully, beneath this 110-foot petrified log to form Agate Bridge. The stone log, harder than the sandstone around it, resisted erosion and remained suspended as the softer rock beneath it washed away.

The kids examine the end of the petrified log

 

Enjoying one last viewpoint

Along our way, we have found many free campsites which, although usually lacking hookups, has provided a much more cost efficient trip for us.

Since returning to the States, the kids have managed to find bikes for all the kids. It has proved to be quite a task finding room to store them while travelling but all in all it has been such a blessing for them to have!

 

Mandy poses by this teepee with her new beach cruiser!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, TX Panhandle, NM & Route 66

While driving Highway 40 through Oklahoma City, the Texas Panhandle and Albuquerque, New Mexico, we would periodically take the time to jump off of the highway and head into old towns in order to follow old Route 66 or 'The Mother Road', "Main Street of America" or "Will Rogers Highway". Completed in 1926, it was the only highway which linked the east to the west, running all the way from Illinois to California.

 

Route 66 served as a major path for those who migrated west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and it supported the economies of the communities through which the road passed. People doing business along the route became prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway, and those same people later fought to keep the highway alive in the face of the growing threat of being bypassed by the new Interstate Highway System.
Route 66 underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, and it was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 27, 1985,^[4] after it had been replaced in its entirety by the Interstate Highway System. Portions of the road that passed through Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona have been designated a National Scenic Byway of the name "Historic Route 66", which is returning to some maps.^[5][6] Several states have adopted significant bypassed sections of the former US 66 into the state road network as State Route 66.

Somewhere in Texas, we pulled off to make lunch. During a quick hike, the kids found this railroad

And our first up-close sight of a cactus

Roadside Lunch Stop

 

Despite cramped quarters, Grant stays cheerful ( well to be honest partially because his Daddy bribed him with a fishing pole from Goodwill as payment to sit in the back with the little girls! :-) )

 

A View of an old windmill off of Route 66 in New Mexico, just outside of Albuquerque

Flash flooding the day before had washed out this section of train track. Through parts of New Mexico and Arizona there were monsoon warnings while we travelled through

A relic from the past on Old Route 66

This deserted farmhouse looked awfully lonely out there in the desert

We stayed the night at this RV park just east of Albuquerque and located up in the mountains,.  That night we experienced a wind and rain storm unlike any we had experienced in the Pacific Northwest. The hosts husband called her from home where he told her their home had been barraged with 4 inches of hail in the storm! It really surprised us because it had been 85 degrees outside!

We loved this old New Mexico pueblo village, located on old Route 66

Continental Divide-

The Continental Divide of the Americas, also called the Great Divide, separates the watersheds of the Pacific Ocean from those of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. It runs from the Seward Peninsula in Alaska, through western Canada along the crest of the Rocky Mountains, including through Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park to New Mexico. From there, it follows the crest of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental and extends to the tip of South America. It is crossed by the Panama Canal and by the two outlets of Isa Lake in Yellowstone National Park.

Stormy Clouds- We were blessed to not have had to experience a lot of poor weather while driving.  Many times we were warned to expect 'monsoonal' weather but managed to escape it for the most part.

 

WELCOME TO ARIZONA! Sedona and Grand Canyon here we come!

 

Settling in and Setting Out

After dropping the UHaul and setting up the travel trailer, we enjoyed some R & R at the lakeside RV Park. We were in situated near Salina, OK, in the Northeastern part of Oklahoma in Cherokee Country. The man who had sold us the trailer was part Cherokee and part Irish. "A Bad Mix" he joked. :-) He told the children about how the Cherokees had found in the civil war, on the side of the South. In fact, the very grounds we were staying on had once been a battlefield. The girls and I loved the host's Colonial style house which was situated at the entrance of the RV park and which dated  back to the early1800's.

 

 

 

We had been warned that it was tornado season and that everyone had been a little on edge because there had been quite a few in the neighboring states but they had been avoided. Like they were expecting ;the big one;. We are definitely not superstitious folks but when the locals are looking nervously at the sky at every cloud, you start getting nervous. It was a bit unnerving really.

Gettin' all hooked up!

The children had a blast running around after being cooped up in a motel or on the road for 5 days..

Ash and Mandy enjoy the lake..

the vegetation was quite different from what we are used to.. I would describe it as marshlands

 

 

 

 

We left in the evening. It turned out there was an issue with the wires connecting the brake lights in the trailer so Grady and Ryan spent most of the day running back and forth to an auto parts store trying to diagnose and fix the problem. Once fixed, we determined to start out even though it was already 7 or so pm. We were anxious to get a little further west.

 

The Journey Begins!

We rented a car from the airport the day after our arrival (they gave us a bright red sports car of course!) It took 3 days to find a great deal on a Suburban . It had minor body damage which dropped the value, as well as somewhat high miles. We were thrilled to finally be able to leave the cramped motel and head off to Oklahoma where we had a lead on a trailer..

Grady.. was this on purpose? ;-)

We love Motel 6 because they are dog friendly!

And kid friendly too! Slight stir-craziness started setting in with some of the children after a day or so.. so we started letting the kids take  turns coming with us on our looking-for-a-truck outings all throughout the Dallas area..

We saw more of the Dallas and outlying areas than I ever imagined existed!

We looked at a total of 5 Suburbans over the course of 4 days..

Craigslist was up all the time, searching all the trucks and trailers within a 300 mile radius! :-)

the girls patiently held down the fort while we searched. After finding our Suburban we checked out of the motel, rented a U Haul for our luggage and headed north to Oklahoma where we had our hopes set on a good trailer..

 

Being fresh from Belize, it was hard not to compare homes like this one to Big Maria's...

 

 

We took a wrong turn and ended up 23 miles from the Kansan border. Yup. And we didn't end up buying that trailer! We found a few others in the area which were all (as our Belizean friend would say) Yucka! Discouraged, we checked Craigslist again and found a newly listed trailer which was a bit over our budget but we called on it anyhow. We travelled the 1 hr to see it and really liked it! Only problem was that it was late Saturday afternoon and we wouldn't be able to get the rest of the cash we would need in order to purchase it until Monday morning.. Well, you know what? The owner sold it to us for what we had on hand, which was $900 less than what he had just listed it for! What a blessing! And to top it off, it was parked at a nice quiet year-round RV park on a lake. The retired couple had used it as a get-away but had found that they were not using it much and had decided to sell it. They were paid up at the park until the end of the month and told us to go ahead and enjoy the time and stay 'till the 30th if we wanted to! :-) First we had to return our UHaul to Tulsa but then enjoyed a breather for a few days where the kids enjoyed the lake and we could move in and prepare for our long haul. The couple was so nice, they even came back to the lake to check on us the day of our departure to make sure that we were getting it all hooked up ok. :-)

 

 

 

We got busy unloading the UHaul and packing our stuff into the travel trailer..

After packing our luggage into the travel trailer we loaded everyone up..

 

..and headed back to Tulsa

..where we dropped the trailer and pointed our Burb back to the lake where we would stay the night at the trailer in quiet and get rested up for the start of our trip home.