Best Western Adobe Inn Holbrook

Notre vraie aventure commence enfin, apres s'etre tape toute cette route! Hallucinant, ces arbres petrifies, temoins du passe luxuriant d'un endroit maintenant desertique et desole.

Entree gratuite dans les Parcs Nationaux en ce jour du souvenir. Nous en profitons ...

... back to Arizona.
This has been a really fun and successful trip, a successful trip is one you dint get in any wrecks in the unfamiliar roads. I read most accidents happen within 10 miles of home, if thats the case maybe we should move!!!!! ha. Hope u all enjoyed reading our blog. I saw tonight that blog had 999 hits, if just one more of you reads it Ill have 1000!!!! Our mileage so far has been 5600 miles when we get home tommorrow we have gone a little over 5800 miles

... me or there were an awful lot of ravens in the park. They seemed to be everywhere. And I did see a prairie dog run across the road.

But the strangest sight I saw was on the interstate. When I first saw it it gave me quite a jolt. I thought someone had driven onto the interstate the wrong way.

Then it was time to find a place for the night. Till tomorrow.

We continued from Texas into New Mexico stopping briefly at White Sands National Monument. The monument is in the middle of a missile testing ground and there is nothing for miles around but sand and dunes. Tom was comparing it to the planet Arrakis and kept professing that he could be the Kwisatch Haderach. It was unbearably bright on the white sand ...

... in the building techniques as the Chaco Canyon Pueblos. These dwellings were built on the ground and the one Kiva we viewed was rectangle with round corners. A definite change of design. We also were shown some wonderful petrography left by these people, and again the inhabitants left around 1300, the same period all the ancient builders left, linking with the scientific discovery of the long drought period from 1276 -1300. Travelling further on, we came ...

... Again due to our time constraints we elected not to do the guided tour, which would have taken us several hours, and because I had already seen the tour on PBS (www.pbs.org). So we just did a self tour, but then I walked the dam solo as Rusty was in no mood to go walking in this heat. I was looking for the state divider in the middle of the road as I ...

... the desert. It was 26 degrees with 30mph winds and there was ice on the shadowed sides of the hills. After about 5 minutes my hands were freezing so I ran to the car and grabbed my gloves (good thing I had to scrape my windshield before I left otherwise I might not have brought them). I spent the next four hours driving from stop to stop getting out taking pictures and then running back and thawing my fingers as I headed to the next spot. The ...

... the box out of polished gems. All the best ones have been picked out she says. It's time to polish up some new gems. Over the winter it is too cold to do that outside. I tell Stella how difficult it is to pick. She suggests that I put aside those that interest me. But I say no, that defeats the purpose of finding the right one that "shines" more than the others, the right one, because you keep on returning to it. The rocks selected, we head to the ...

... Canyon. This trip is very long, and more expensive on a 1 day tour bus. Flagstaff is a great place, with a fantastic pair of Hostels (the Dubeau and the uniquely named Grand Canyon Hostel) People told us it would be cold, but I didn't really believe it. We drove at night so I didnt really notice the long uphill travel into snow filled landscapes until we arrived in Flagstaff, six hours later. We both foolishly checked in to the Hostel and went out drinking. We had ...