Knocking around.

The last couple of days have been kind of quiet.  I had to chase down some hard to find screws to put braces back in place on the truck bed side step.  This past year has seen a lot of screws and bolts worked loose by the always present vibration that a diesel generates.  Big Gulp is seven years old now and has nearly 100,000 miles on the odometer.  He is beginning to feel the time and miles.

But so far it is just small things.  Staying on top of them and fixing them before they turn into bigger things will assure a much better chance of many more years and miles of reliable transportation.

One of the last couple of days neither one of us even got out of our pajamas until almost four in the afternoon.  We would not have even done it then were it not for me getting a wild hair and telling Cyndee to get herself together so I could take her out to dinner.

We went into Winslow and stopped in at an historic landmark, the La Posada Inn.  It was one of the last and maybe grandest Harvey House built. 

The front entrance is less than grand, but once inside it is a real "wow".

Like many Harvey Houses it was built track-side to the Santa Fe line.  Although there are no trains in the picture, this line sees 90 trains a day.  It was more of a rarity to get a picture without a train than with one.

Since the railroad was the primary delivery point for people to the hotel, the back of the hotel was more impressive and inviting than the front.

But inside was the real treat.  We planned dinner for the Turquoise Room, it usually requires reservations but we were there at 5pm sharp, opening time, and were able to get seated next to a window that overlooked a croquet field and the passing trains.

The entrance was into a lobby of sorts, more like a large hallway.  And there were about a half-dozen of these large hallways, all essentially a museum of their own.

The reception area is a bit of a quirky set-up.  You have to go to the gift shop cash register and check in, schlepping your luggage past racks of dream catchers, kachina dolls and jewelry cases full of turquoise.

This outstanding old hotel was almost lost to the wrecking ball.  By 1957, after only 27 years since being built, it had fallen out of favor as a hotel and was converted into an office building for Santa Fe Railroad.  Almost all the original fine décor was stripped out and auctioned off for the conversion.  Santa Fe did little to conserve or preserve the old building, it was nearly demolished several times over the years, the latest threat came when Santa Fe moved out for good in 1994.  A private investor got involved and formed an LLC to raise funds and restore the old hotel to its original purpose.  $12 million later and you have a great old hotel on the national register.  A brochure said that reservations are necessary as the hotel is full nearly every night.

Our dinner in the Turquoise Room was time well spent, if not a little on the expensive side.  We had an appetizer that was a sacred Hopi bread with hummus.  The bread was not anything that you would expect from something called bread.  It was green and rolled up like a burrito, but the layers of this corn-based bread were as thin and flaky as you would expect from a French pastry.  It was far too fragile to dip in the hummus, while gently holding the roll of bread in one hand  you had to spoon the hummus on carefully with the other.

The dinner that followed was just as interesting and delicious.  It was a dish called Killer Grilled Vegetable Plate.  The things that the chef did with vegetables was amazing.  We went through about nine different variations of grilled vegetables and huge freight trains lumbering by about every ten minutes.

As I write this it has become fully dark outside and Cyndee has just informed me that the sky is clear.  After nearly two months on the road and I forget how many campgrounds out in the boonies, we have not had a night where the sky is clear and light pollution minimal.  Tonight everything has come together for some serious star gazing.  There is a break in the monsoon and not only is there no clouds in the sky, but the air is dry and haze-free too.  After a few minutes our eyes adjust to the dark and before us lay a carpet of stars.  At first the Milky Way appears as a wispy, thin cloud but the more our eyes adjust to the dark the more pronounced the spiral arm of our galaxy becomes.  Outstanding!  The desert is calm, only the slightest breeze and a perfect temperature.  The end to our stargazing is brought on by cricks in our necks.

Today we were supposed to move to Flagstaff as a staging area for the trip to The North Rim.  But after a lot of searching for campgrounds in Flagstaff we found that the price for a sight at anyplace that could accommodate us was outside what we find as acceptable.  We just decided to add two more nights to our stay here at Homolovi and drive an extra 50 miles on moving day.

But we still have to lay in a stock of supplies before leaving for the remoteness of the north side of the Grand Canyon.  Winslow has a Walmart where we can get access to some of the specialty items we like for our diet plan.  Today we bought eight boxes of Special K Protein cereal, a slug of Mio flavors and a whole basket full of paper-goods like towels, plates and tissue.  We are stuffing things anywhere we can find to put it.  Tomorrow we will get over to Flagstaff and buy our large quantity items, mostly frozen food like chicken, fish, beef and vegetables.  We have three containers that we can keep cold food in.  But they are going to need a little help to keep things frozen until we get to our freezer at the campground on the North Rim.  To do this we will find someplace that we can get dry ice and line our two freezer bags and one ice chest.

We are also going to buy as many cases of bottled water as the back seat of Big Gulp will hold.  The bed of the truck is already full of junk, that is why the back seat is going to be the water pantry.  We'll get quite a bit of what we need bought in this one trip but we know that there will still have to be some long trips to the grocery store in Utah to replenish fresh foods.

Our volunteer coordinator said that we can come a day earlier than planned, the camp host site is going to be open the afternoon of the 31st so we are going to go ahead and get in there.  My next post will probably be from the North Rim.

Petrified forests and painted deserts.

A full day of sightseeing today.  From a little after sunup to just before sundown we were winding our way through 56 miles of national park.  The Petrified Forest and Painted Desert share a common, long, winding road that get you up to or on top of some amazing geological wonders.  But while we were filling the cooler with ice and snacks and a picnic lunch we had a visitor.

I never knew hummingbirds were everywhere.  Or at least they seem to be as they show up at the feeder everywhere we have been for the last four thousand miles.

I took over a 150 pictures today, narrowing it down to just a few for this post was tough but there were a few that stood out.  We took I-40 back to the east from our campground in Homolovi Ruins for about 15 miles until we got to Holbrook, AZ.  The route once again got us on a preserved section of Route 66 and as soon as we hit town it looked as though we had stepped back in time 60 or 70 years.  I had seen pictures of some of the old motels and how some of them had done some over-the-top things to set themselves apart from the crowd.  One that always seemed to make the travel guides and books were the ones that had rooms built to look like teepees.  Today we saw one live, and it was not just preserved for looking at, it was an active motel with paying customers.

The Wigwam Motel, complete with cars from the 40's, 50's and whatever last nights customer's drove.

Another ten miles down a remote state highway and we were at the entrance to our first objective of the day, The Petrified Forest.

It does not look like much at first, just a lot of wide open country.  But in just a little ways down the park road the first developed "museum garden" comes into view.  We park and walk into the garden and are immediately struck by the color and beauty of innumerable petrified trees.  But the claim to fame of this museum is that they have the single largest fossilized tree in its natural state.  They call it Old Faithful.

This bad boy just looks like an old tree that has fallen over.  But in reality it is 212 million years old and pure crystallized minerals.

Cyndee threw me in the shot to give a little sense of scale.

The garden had plenty of other specimens.  Check out those cliffs in the background; mounds of blue volcanic ash topped with a layer of sandstone.

 

As we drove further into the park there were so many sights to look at that our heads were spinning on our shoulders.  But there was a butte made of ash, and it was layers of varying hues of blue, that gave us reason to stop and get out and explore.

 



Opposite the butte was another petrified forest garden.  Actually there are huge amounts of petrified trees all over tens of thousands of acres that this park encompasses.  We took a walk in this one too and while out in the desert I turned and looked back towards the parking area.  Big Gulp was standing there looking to get his picture taken.  I obliged him.

Back at the parking lot we noticed an onlooker.  It was a large (very large) raven and he was very tolerant of being close to people.  He let me walk within just a few feet and get his portrait.  I got the feeling that he was expecting a little something in return.

The next turn-out was a three and a half mile drive across to and up onto a mesa.  It's name was Blue Mesa.  And once we got there it was easy to see how it got its name.

I think the local ravens have a racket running.  Again we were approached by a pair that hopped up really close and just looked you right in the eye.  And again they hung in there while both Cyndee and I had cameras pointed at them.

This time there was a payoff.  They both got a half of a Newton's Fruit Thin cookie.  And let me tell you, we did not have to break the cookie into pieces for them to eat it.  These guys are as big as some red-tail hawks I have seen.  They each picked up their half and tossed it back in one gulp.

Next stop, Painted Desert.  About twenty six miles after entering the park on the south end and following the single road north you come to the Painted Desert.  It is amazing the almost instant change in color from the blue and white ash capped with marbled-brown sandstone to the reds of The Painted Desert.

We also had the added bonus that we are here during the monsoon season and recent rains had water in the river and the vegetation greened up.  There were no driving roads that put you down in the desert, just a few walking trails.  It was mid-day by now and too hot to start off on a walkabout.  We would have to be satisfied with seeing the painted desert from overlooks.

One of those overlooks is the Painted Desert Inn, an Historic National Landmark.  This is a relatively small pueblo style hotel that is built on the edge of a cliff overlooking The Painted Desert.  It was originally an even smaller, privately owned hotel.  Actually one of the many Harvey Houses built in the 20's and 30's.  It was later acquired by the government and the Conservation Corp enlarged the hotel and added amenities like running water.

The CCC added another level to the hotel that included these hand painted skylights.

This patio that looks out over The Painted Desert was originally the main entrance to the hotel.  Visitors had to walk down a path around the hotel from the road to enter.  Note the thunderhead in the distance.

I've said it before, two dimensional media just cannot do justice to the grandeur of nature.

The Painted Desert Inn, July 2013

We returned the same way we came.  We could have exited the park at The Painted Desert and jumped on I-40, straight to Homolovi Ruins but we wanted to visit a couple of commercial petrified wood operations that were just outside the entrance of the park on the south end.  Cyndee was hoping to score a pair of ear rings crafted from petrified wood and to see what other things were being done with these ancient oddities.

This impressively large and polished piece of petrified wood has been fashioned into a table-top.  It can be yours for just $24,000.

We made our way to a final stop that was what we believed to be the largest petrified wood operation in existence.  Jim Gray's Petrified Wood Co. was a place you could spend days going through in order to see everything they had to offer.  When I stepped through the door I stopped momentarily to get over the sensory overload of all the stuff before me.  Cyndee found the ear rings she wanted and we collected a two pound piece of petrified wood.  It was in a four foot tall pile of similar sized pieces from the lot out back, where there had to be millions of pounds more of all kinds of decorative stone.  We were torn about adding weight to the rig, but desire won out over practicality and we are now toting around a rock.

It had been a long day and the clouds I made note of in the distance over The Painted Desert had swelled to consume what seemed like all of the desert southwest.  The wind was howling and the rain was falling sideways.  It was time to get home and hunker down for the night.

Poacher!

I'm sorry to have to report that we have had little mayhem in the campground.  A couple of large dogs, one a cow-dog and the other a retriever wandered into the campground.  At first they appeared to be just knocking around and enjoying the evening like us.  But things changed quickly.

We have more critters here in the campground than just the lizards I have been posting.  In fact, Cyndee's geranium that has made the transcontinental trip with us has been showing signs of being grazed on, probably by this guy:

But it was not long before the grazer became prey.  I was standing in our campsite fiddling with the awning when all of a sudden a streak of black and grey passed right under me.  I looked up to see the cow-dog in hot pursuit of a cotton tail rabbit with the black retriever close behind, just along for the run.  Everybody disappeared behind the bath house and I expected that the rabbit had made it to a safe hole under the building or something.

But I was wrong.  In about ten minutes I noticed the cow-dog waltzing down the road and he was carrying something in his mouth.  His pursuit had paid off, he got his rabbit.

The cow-dog and his retriever running buddy found themselves some shade under a distant tree and the cow-dog enjoyed the fruits of his labor while the retriever looked on longingly.  The rabbit population dropped by one this day but I don't think there was any serious damage done to the rabbit community at large.  We still have them hopping around all over the place.

A big hole in the ground and ancient ruins.

I am going to preface this post with the suggestion that if you have access to a large monitor this post will be a lot more enjoyable to read.  My 22.5" monitor makes the photos far more entertaining than my 15" laptop.  You can double-click on any picture and view it full screen.

It is a warm morning here in the Arizona desert.  We are off to a location about 15 miles west of Winslow, it is the first confirmed and best preserved impact crater on earth.  Meteor Crater lies just a few miles south of I-40 after you get west of Winslow in the desert valley.  The San Francisco Mountains are another 43 miles to the west with Flagstaff spread out on their foothills.

As we pull into the parking lot of the Meteor Crater visitor center we can see that they have a major expansion project underway.  It would seem that the attraction is doing well and they are executing on a ten year improvement/expansion program.  Even at this early stage of construction we can tell it is going to be a pretty nice facility when they are done.

There is a museum, theater and gift shop to be explored but we got out to the crater first because the temperature was climbing quickly.  We'll get our hiking and climbing in up front and take in the air conditioned parts last.

It is an age-old problem for photographers, it is just about impossible to represent the scale of large things through the lens.  Two-dimensional media is a very poor representation of three dimensional grandeur.  But we took lots of pictures anyway to help us remember what we saw.

It is a mile wide across the top and 550 feet deep.  You could fit the whole of downtown San Francisco in the crater and the Transamerica Pyramid building would not rise above the rim.

The San Francisco Mountains as seen from the rim of Meteor Crater.  This view is across 43 miles of desert floor.  It is too hazy to see but Flagstaff lies at the foot of the big one on the left.

 

Kids, take note.  Yes that is your mother standing on a platform that is waaayyy off the ground.  I only jokingly gestured to her to go down there for a picture but was shocked when she said; "Okay" and took off for the platform.  We may have to go back to San Francisco to see if she will walk over the Golden Gate this time.

I had to get in on a platform picture too.  It is too far away to see but in the bottom center is a mine shaft, huge steam-powered winch and a ten foot tall by fifteen foot long boiler to power the winch.  All abandoned since about 1909.

To get access to one of the trails along the rim you had to participate in a guided tour, included in the $16/person admission price.  Our guide, Eduardo was both knowledgeable and entertaining plus he took a portrait of everybody in the tour with their own camera.

We had an onlooker.  I didn't recognize this particular lizard but I know he had one heck of a long tail.  I was quite a ways off when photographing him so his color is a little less brilliant looking than it was in real life.

 

After a stroll through the museum and gift shop it was getting along lunch time so we headed back to Homolovi Ruins Campground.  On the way in Cyndee decided we should drive on to one of the four ruin sites before going to the camper.  We picked site II and drove the five miles down the narrow asphalt road to the site.

Site II is a long way from anything.  We were out here mid-day and there was not another soul in sight.  This shot is standing on the ruin and looking back in the direction we came from.  You can just make out the thin ribbon of road on the left.

 

All the places we have ever been to before were extremely protective of their archaeological sites and artifacts, but here at Homolovi Ruins you literally walk into/on the ruins.  The quantity of artifacts just laying around on the ground is almost overwhelming.  Most of it is shards of pottery, all 700 years old.   Note: We took nothing but photos, all artifacts were looked at and placed back on the ground where they were found.

 



Cyndee came across a large piece of flint that someone had started to make into a point.

It seems that it is customary for visitors to the ruins to place pottery shards they find on a nearby rock as a display.  There were a lot of display rocks.

Hard to see in a photograph but every light-brown or tan rock you see is actually a piece of 700 year old pottery.  It was just laying thick on the ground everywhere.

In the center of the frame is a dugout room, one of about 1,300 on this site.  The green swath of vegetation in the distance is where the Little Colorado River cuts through the desert.

This rock seemed to be the gathering place for shards that have prominent designs on them.

This is one of the larger pieces and it has a distinct painted design on it.

This large piece really impressed me.  It was imprinted with a basket weave design.  There were also pieces that had scales, like a snake's skin.

There are so many artifacts! 

 

I think we came across a cousin of the critter we met at Meteor Crater this morning.  These guys have some of the longest legs and tails I have ever seen on a lizard.  The one below made it easy for me, he seemed to want his portrait taken as he let me get pretty close.

 

If you double click on this photo and enlarge it you can see what looks like exquisite bead work on his back.

 The clouds on the horizon have become quite large early in the day.  They are about 40 miles away and look like they are topping out at about 50,000 feet as they are beginning to form the classic anvil-top of a super cell that made it all the way up to the jet-stream.  Looks like we may have some powerful thunderstorms come our way this afternoon.  Time to get back to the camper and get some (late) lunch.

I think Cyndee has the Petrified Forest on her mind for tomorrow.

Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona....

Winslow is a genuine old west town with a lot of history.  But most people know the name of the town because of the Eagles song Take it Easy.  The song paints a pretty vivid picture as Glenn Fry sings about a girl in a flat-bed Ford slowing down to take a look at him.  The city has capitalized on this little diddy and put together a pretty impressive tourist attraction.

Look closely at the wall, that's a reflection in the store window of a girl in a flat-bed Ford slowing down to take a look at me

Cyndee and I shamelessly did the tourist thing and snapped photos of each other standing on the corner in Winslow, AZ.

Part of today was also dedicated to getting prepped for the move to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Since trips to buy food are going to be widely spaced because of the 170 mile round trip to the nearest grocery store we are trying to stock up on the things we can.  When inventorying what was in the freezer we discovered that we were in dire need of a defrosting.  Ice had built up enough that it was consuming space that could be better used to hold some meat or ice cream, yeahhh, ice cream.  So three hours and about a gallon of sponged up ice melt later we had room to lay in some supplies.

The trip to Winslow was not just for being tourists.  Winslow has a Walmart Supercenter and we took advantage of having access to a lot of the brands we like.  Just as we walked in the door they were taking chickens out of the rotisserie, they smelled really good and it was a no-brainer what we were going to have for supper.  We got a lot of things but we will still have to make a run to Sam's Club in Flagstaff for a number of bulk, frozen items.  We have a small cooler and two of those large thermal bags.  Our plan is to get some dry ice and fill all three containers with as much chicken breasts, tilapia and frozen vegetables as we can and hope we get it to the freezer waiting for us at the North Rim before it thaws.

Back at the camper and with everything put away, we decided to grill some vegetable to go with our rotisserie chicken.  While outside grilling it became apparent that the uncomfortably hot day had become a gorgeous evening so we set the outdoor table and had supper al fresco.

As we were sitting at the picnic table we were faced east.  At some point Cyndee looked around and amid the hush of the desert she leaned over and whispered; "Look over your shoulder".  I turned and it was a flood of light and color.  The Arizona desert was putting on a sunset that you could not look away from.

Can the Arizona desert put on a sunset or what?

Tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, we will go to meteor crater and fork over $16 a person to look at a big hole in the ground.

We crossed a line today.

Today we traveled from Albuquerque, NM to Winslow, AZ.  For Cyndee and I both, this is the farthest west we have ever driven.  We've both been further west, but by plane.  We are now enjoying being up close and personal with things we had only seen from thirty thousand feet.

Our final destination is a state park just outside Winslow; Homolovi Ruins.  The drive on I-40 between Alb. and Winslow is probably the most pleasant part of I-40 I have ever been on.  There were a few long, shallow climbs that drained off some of the speed Big Gulp managed to build but the road was smooth and once leveled back out on the valley floor the speed came back easily.

We had one stop for fuel at a Flying J truck stop about half way.  As we got on down the road later I learned that I probably picked the highest priced gas on the whole trip route at just a few pennies short of $4.00/gal.

Homolovi Ruins was a short distance off to the north of I-40, about two exits before Winslow.  The road in is a very narrow asphalt road with really rough seams about every hundred feet.  Rough enough it knocked one of my mud flaps loose and dislodged a fender flair brace.  I'll have to do some mechanic'n tomorrow.

To our surprise the campground was completely empty, save the campground host.  I guess snagging the only sight with a sewer connection was not such a big deal after all.  But we don't know why this place is empty, it is great. 

This campground is wide open, it is the desert, backing in should be a snap.  But wouldn't you know it, our site had a small tree planted right at the edge of the pavement and Cyndee had to do a lot of scurrying back and forth between my mirrors to snake us into place without dragging a tree limb down the side of the trailer.

This is high desert camping.  Except for the out of place scrawny trees, it is nothing but sage, chaparral and tumbleweeds.

There is nobody out here but us.  A big thunderstorm is building about 20 miles away.

 Tomorrow we will explore some of the ruins and check out Winslow.  They have a Walmart so we should be able to start stocking up on the groceries we will need to take to the North Rim.