Tuesday, June 21, 2016

I forgot to mention the large truckstop complex that we stopped at in eastern New Mexico yesterday.  It had restrooms labeled "Elvis" and "Marilyn" with the words Men and Women in small letters underneath.  I guess that was for the people who didn't know what gender Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe were.😃

Continuing west, we stopped at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona not too far from the New Mexico border.  It's the smallest national park.  There is a fire burning in the area so it was pretty smoky at the visitor center.  It has a 26 mile loop for driving and lots of trails.  We looked at all the samples of petrified trees in the center but decided not to do the loop because of the poor visibility and it was in the high 90's temperature wise.

Next stop was Winslow.  It was a must stop place so we could be standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona.  And it was 100 degrees here so the statue of Glenn Frey was very hot to the touch.

Not too far past Winslow is the Meteor Crater.  It's 6 miles off the interstate and worth a visit.  It's the largest and best preserved meteor crater in the world.  It's huge.  In the 10 minute film, a graph showed that 20 football games could be going on at once on the floor of it and that the stadium around the fields could hold two million people.  It's that big.  The visitor center is new and very well done.  They have a space capsule on display outside it.  We went out on the observation deck and looked through the permanently mounted telescopes there.  They are focused on areas where research has been done.  We could not see these things with our naked eye.  There is a US flag posted on the floor of the crater and that couldn't be seen without a scope.  Someone standing close to us said that it is as deep as the Washington Monument is tall but we don't know that to be true.  It looked deeper from our vantage point.

As it was 100 degrees here, we opted not to do the guided walking tour.  Just being outside for ten minutes made me feel dried to a crisp.

We had lunch in Flagstaff and are in Kingman, Arizona tonight.  It was 102 and 7 percent humidity when we got here.