Back in New Mexico

30 Sep 2010--We left Arizona yesterday and headed back to New Mexico again. We wanted to stop because when we were here back in May we didn't get to see the Capitol building, and starting on 2 October the Hot Air Balloon Festival begins. I posted the state flag again, because there will be a test at the end of the travel season and I wanted to remind you what it looked like!

We drove just over 200 miles, about 150 of it in New Mexico, and this is basically what you see for most of the trip. There is an incredible amount of empty space left in our country, no matter how crowded we sometimes feel.

Some parts are prettier than others, but most of it is flat and empty.

Something totally new is a several mile stretch of what they call "Lavaland." It looks like someone dumped tar balls along the side of the road, but it is big chunks of lava on either side of you, very deep away from the road.

You can tell you are on a reservation when you see sights like these. Up close you can see that lots of windows are missing in the houses of pics 2 and 3. Sort of depressing.

Especially when you see these casinos right up the road from the rundown houses/trailers. A case of "the man" taking advantage of the little guy again, as Walter would say! haha

We pulled into Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque and are going to stay at the Famcamp here for a week. We totally lucked out because we weren't supposed to be able to get a spot at all due to the Balloon Festival, but we got the last spot...God blesses us in many ways!!!

Hallie wanted me to take some pics of cactus...she means the conventional 3-pronged cactus, but I haven't seen any yet...so here are a few I saw on base.

When we came to New Mexico back in May we stayed in Santa Fe on a weekend, and didn't know that the Capitol wasn't open at that time. So we drove there today, about 65 miles from Albuquerque, to take a tour of the building. We wished someone had told us it wasn't worth it!!! We have seen some really nice Capitol buildings, but this one was bland, bland, bland! Even from the outside, you can't get a good pic of the circular building because of the trees in front of it. And on the inside it is just boring. This is the entrance to the Governor's office along with the state seal.

Note: I forgot to mention it when I posted this last night, so this is added in after the fact. The Legislature here in New Mexico is another one that hardly works at all. By law they only meet for 30 or 60 days, every other year. And we were told that they are 1 of only 2 Legislatures that are truly "citizen legislatures"...by that they mean their politicians are not paid a salary at all. They get per diem of $144.00 a day when they are in session and that is it. The only other state like that is New Hampshire.

They were very proud of the fact that they had a lot of art in the building, so I will show you some.

This buffalo was the best. Made of paintbrushes, film, and nails!

This is the rotunda...it doesn't even go to the top of the 4th floor...only to the 3rd.

This was the old Capitol, which they have renovated and made into state offices. The new and current Capitol was built in 1966 and renovated in 1990...it forms the Zia sun symbol. They had no mention of the state's history, the building's history, nothing! I feel like the old building would have been better.

So the trip was a disappointment, but that's alright. Most Capitols have been beautiful, and we anticipate that others will be as well as we continue our journey.

Petrified Forest and Painted Desert

28 Sep 2010--Arrived in Holbrook, AZ yesterday afternoon, staying at a small RV Park just till Wednesday morning when we will head for Albuquerque for a couple days.

We stopped here to go to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert, a place Marie's friend from school, Linda, had told us about it. She had been here before and recommended it, so seeing as we were going in this direction, we decided to check it out.

A 28 mile road runs thru the park, where it seems the majority of it is Painted Desert, followed by the last few miles that are a combo of the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest. What is surprising is how normal so much of the park looks. As you are driving around you probably have one of these scenes on your right...

While you would have one of these scenes on your left. Check out these stitch pics!

Whether pink, black or white with green thrown in, the landscape is incredibly colorful.

Like the area in South Dakota that goes by the name, this area is considered to be "badlands"...they say they even have them in Pakistan, although those badlands are millions of years younger than ours.

They found dinosaur bones here as recently as 1984.

I took these 3 pics so you could see how the colors of the landscape could change dramatically in a very small span of space. You are basically looking, left to right, at 3 successive pics that go from black to pink.

Here they explain that the pink layers we are looking at are about 225 million years old, while the black top layer is "only" 5-8 millions old.

Right in the middle of the park they have this "Route 66" display. They talk about Americans travelling cross country, experiencing different cultures and lifestyles...I think that is as true today as it was 50 years ago!

There are ruins here that are very much like the places we saw in Mesa Verde Nat'l Park, but not anywhere near extensive. People lived here back in the 1200-1300s.

And like the petroglyphs we saw outside Canyonlands Nat'l Park, these people left behind a lot of drawings...something like 650 in this area of the park alone.

You can clearly see a petrified tree amongst these rocks...The 2nd pic is a close-up of it in the 1st pic. There are more rocks coming up, so I will explain here how this process happens. Over 200 million years ago, when the trees fell, they were washed into an adjacent floodplain. A mix of silt, mud, and volcanic ash buried the logs. That sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs decay. Silica-laden groundwater then seeped thru the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood. (I copied all that info...didn't know it off the top of my head! haha)

Here are a few more pics of the Painted Desert as we drove past it.

And here are a bunch of rocks that used to be trees! They are incredibly colorful, and some of them still look like trees. Marie, I am sure Emily would love these, they are really beautiful up close.

Here is a great example...the rock in the 1st pic is really a rock...even looks like a rock...until you go to either end...especially in the 3rd pic where you can actually see the tree rings.

In this 1st pic you can see logs up on the ridge. In the 2nd it looks like someone cut up a bunch of trees and threw them in the valley. And the 3rd pic shows what is now a beautifully colored rock just off the side of the road.

By the way, it is illegal to take even a chip of these rocks/trees out of the park. There is a ranger station at the exit that can stop you to search your car if they choose to.

They had observation points off the side of the road, and several places where you could go for short hikes as long as you stayed on the paved road.

Driving out of the park, just 2 interesting pics. Doesn't the 2nd pic look like a man's face on the upper, left of it?

This was a really interesting park, bewteen all the different colors in the badlands, the petrified trees, Route 66, ruins and petroglyphs, there was a good mix of stuff going on that kept you surprised as you progressed thru it. My favorite parts were the pink/white/black hills of the Painted Desert, but the whole thing was quite interesting.