The desert and wood....

So that would be the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest and our next main stop along our way to the reunion.  I actually need to add a correction to the previous post;  the picture of Baby and I was actually taken on this day on our lunch break in Albuquerque, NM... oops ;).  

Anyway, so after a long detour, since the off ramp was under construction, we arrived at the Painted Desert.  It was also raining (and since we haven't seen any of that in almost 2 months it was a welcomed site, just too bad it wasn't raining in TX)... with the rain and wind it made getting out more difficult, but we managed a few times - otherwise it was a nice car drive checking out all of the cool parts of the National Park!

I just love looking at the red in the desert.  Makes it so cool and alive looking :)

One of our stops getting all of the kids out - with Grandma.

See, I told you it was windy!

 It was really cool to see the different colors through the dirt.

Talmage

We crossed over to the Petrified Forest side of the park and found lots of cool stuff. 


Newspaper Rock.  You can see the petroglyphs (pictures) on the bottom of the rocks (huge rocks), made by Native Americans years ago.  Really the carvings are so tiny... so you may need to zoom in to see them.  They are in the black parts of the rock.

Talamge

Trying to give you some size perspective on how large the rocks were... at the very bottom of the rocks in the black sections are the pictures.

We were up on a platform looking through the viewfinders to get a good look at the pictures.  Oh, and Clark was being cute ;).

This is the Agate Bridge.  One of the logs that had come out of the erosion and a gully formed under it creating a natural bridge.  The cement under the log is to give it support, but eventually it will wear away.

They call this mound of dirt the Blue Tepees (I think) because it's triangular like a tepee and they have blue and other cool colors in them.

Me and the kids outside the Petrified Forest Museum... look at all that petrified wood!

The kids with a huge piece of polished rock, or wood, or whatever :)

Day 2 down.  Made it to Holbrook, AZ, ate dinner, and stayed the night ... ready to get to the reunion!