Rock Stars

This was the day of the rock. After taking a mini tour of Holbrook, Arizona, we traveled down the road and stopped at a petrified wood shop. This store was fantastic! You would have thought the boys had mistakenly come across a candy shop or something! There were so many displays in varieties of petrified wood, rock and fossils here. Not only that, but they had a pond with a waterfall and turtles right in the middle of the store. Alex picked up a souveneir, Logan, a couple of fossils, Reid, a souveneir and shark's tooth choker, and Mom, a torquois bracelet. Two hours later, we left and headed to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert. (website: www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/petrified_forest/national_park.html) We actually should have visited these attractions first, because the petrified wood shop was more interesting to look at (according to the boys). It was a pretty warm day in the Arizona desert, so our car-side stops were brief and eventually we had the attitude of "you've seen one petrified piece of wood, you've seen them all". All the wood we saw, however, was quite remarkable. The whole process of how the wood got that way really interested the boys. Alex gave Dad a break at the wheel and tried his hand at tourist driving through the parks. He did well for putting up with the rest of us hoodlums on the road. Our family has also come to the conclusion that although the Painted Desert is a lovely site, we don't think it's as brillant or as colorful as the area between Moab and St. George (Hwy 70 from Denver).

We had hoped to reach Gallop the day before, but since that didn't happen, our visit to Gallop was shortened to a few Geocache sites, a stop or two at some Trading Posts and then the car wash to spray off the bombardment of bug guts on the truck. Gallop was not quite what we expected. Train town. Quiet. Many Native American residents. So we headed on to Shiprock (this massively huge mountain-like rock just a few miles long out in the middle of nowhere...shaped like the front of a ship). We almost missed the turn off to Four Corners, New Mexico, but eventually realized this small, two-laned highway was the right path to where we were going. As we pulled up to the Four Corners monument (also out in the middle of nowhere), we read on a sign that welcomed us wholeheartedly and then promptly announced that it would cost our family $15.00...$3.00/person to enter and merely stand on a survey marker that pronounced you were standing in four states (Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado) at once. Naturally, we paid, figuring to take $15.00 worth of pictures for this monumental event. Hmmmm. It's all for the memories and something to talk about.

The day was nearing to an end, so we were hoping to camp in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, but we didn't make it there in time to get a spot, so we camped right outside the quaint town of Cortez, Colorado at Target Tree Campground. This was a great choice! It was a beautiful, quiet (until we got there), clean, woodsy campground. That night we ventured 20 miles east to Durango to get dinner at a patient Mexican restaurant that agreed to serve us even though it was almost 9pm. After we made it back from dinner, we pulled the twentieth century camper move. We pulled out the laptop and watched a movie in the tent while it rained on us! No sleep that night with all the rain, lightning and thundering!