Sunday, July 9, 2006

We drove out to the east side of the park to the Desert View.  From there you can see the edge of the painted desert.  You also get an nice view of the canyon.  Then we drove out of the park into the Navaho Reservation.  We ate lunch in a restaurant in the Trading Post.  We ate this thing called a Navaho Taco, it was pretty good.

In the evening, we tried to attend a fireside program, but it started to rain.  The Ranger had to "officially" cancel the program, but she hung around to talk to the fools who chose to hang around in the rain.  She had a lot to tell everyone about the Mountain Lions, which they do have here in the park.  It was pretty interesting.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Left The Grand Canyon.  Drove back out the east side of the park through the Navajo Reservation.  Spent way too much time and money in the shops long the way.  Started the drive through a loop that encompasses both the Wupatki National Monument and the Sunset Crater National Monument. Which is in the Kaibab National Forrest, located in the San Francisco Mountains.  The San Francisco Mountains were created by volcanoes.  The neat thing is that it is still very volcanic.  There are several places to pull over and hike out to Pueblonain  in Ruins.  These ancient people are the ancestors of today's Hopi people.  They are called Pueblonain in because they lived in Pueblos, or building made of stones.   We found a place to camp in the National Forrest.  Since everything is primitive anyway,  we decided not to stay in the campground where all the people were, but instead to drive out to an area that is used for ATV's. It is very odd looking around here.    They say this area has lots of people camping in it on the weekends, but there was not a soul there today.  We sat outside for a long time just watching the moon rise up over the mountains.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Finished making the loop around the Monuments.  Hiked around the Lava Flow Trail.  This is the lava flow from the Sunset Crater.  The volcano is 900 years old, which is really quite young, add to the picture that we are in the middle of the desert, not too much has managed to grow on this volcanic ground so you can still see everything quite well.  The lava flow is everywhere.

There is a computer in the visitor center that shows a model of the earth and all seismic activity on the planet.  You can see every earthquake that happened today, yesterday, last week, last month ect.  It will give you the coordinates, the name of the town, state, country, as well as the magnitude of the quake.  I would imagine that this is how someone from across the country was able to call the Mayor of Port Vincent a few months ago to tell him we had an earthquake when no one in Port Vincent even felt it.

After leaving Sunset Crater, we made a stop at Walnut Canyon National Monument.  Here you can hike down the side of the cliffs to see more ancient ruins.  These were built on the side of the cliffs, by the Sinaqua people.  They are really neat.  It is really hard to try to figure out why they would have picked this place to live.  They say that this group of people are also ancestors of today's Hopi people.  They say they all lived in the area around Sunset Crater and they moved out to Wupatki and Walnut Canyon when the volcano started to act up.

We needed to get some prescriptions  filled for the kids so we made a stop at the Wal-mart in Winslow  Arizona.  It was there that we encountered the rudest people on the face of the earth.  Any of you guys that have ever watched "Seinfeld", you know who the "Soup Nazi" is.  Well, we found the "RX Nazis".   There were three people working in the pharmacy, and they were all detestable.  We waited 1 1/2 to get out RX's filled after being told it would only be 30 minutes.  Waiting for 1 1/2 hours was not really the problem.  We sat there for 1 1/2 hours watching the meanest people on earth yell at and insult every person in line.  These people did nothing to provoke this kind of treatment.  I was yelled at twice and Kaleb was yelled at as well.  According to the people in line, this was normal behavior for this pharmacy.  The only reason they come back is because there is nowhere else they can go.  There is only one other pharmacy in town, and they don't take everyone's insurance.  However; they say that pharmacy is not any better.

We drove out to The Petrified Forrest, but found that there were  no campgrounds in or around the park, so we had to drive back to the nearest sign of civilization to a place to camp.  We are staying at the Route 66 Campground in Sun Valley.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Another one of those really awesome days where everything you see it just to beautiful to comprehend.  We spent the day at the Painted Desert/Petrified Forrest.  The desert is just awesome and then there are these big huge pieces of Petrified Wood everywhere.  It is sad to say that the amount of petrified wood left in the park is not anywhere near the amount that used to be here.  It has all been stolen by visitors to the park.  Everyone seems to think that if they just take one small piece, it wont really matter, but no one stops to think, that if everyone takes just one small piece, soon there will be nothing left for future generations to see.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Left The Petrified Forrest and headed into New Mexico.  Before we could make it to the state line, a tire on the camper blew out.  It put a good size hole in the underside of the trailer and busted the water line.  We changed the tire and got to the next town.  By the time Everett was able to get the parts and get the water line fixed, then find a new spare tire, we had lost two hours.

We were driving down the hwy and in the distance, we could see some really odd looking, very large, white things. There were a whole bunch of them.  When we got closer, we could tell that they were really huge satellite dishes.  We had to pull over to get a look.  At the pull over, there was a sign telling you about them.  They are a huge telescope.  They are all linked together and work as one dish.  This is the way scientist have made all the discoveries about space.  There are some single satellites spread out  across the world, but this is the only one that has several all working together.  They are called VLA "Very Large Array" National Radio Astronomy Observatory.  There is a move called "Contact" where they filmed in this area.  In the movie, they are using the satellites to look for Aliens.  There are 27 satellites placed in a "T" pattern.  They each are 98' tall, 84' around.  It is really wild looking sitting out in the middle of the desert.

Friday, July 14, 2006

Drove from the petrified forest to Roswell New Mexico.  Not a lot to see, just desert.  Lots of rabbits and cactus.  We did drive past an area where there was massive lava flow.  That was pretty neat. We drove through the Town of Lincoln which is where the whole Billy The Kid story started.

When we got into town, we found a campground and then we went to Golden Corral for dinner.  It started to rain pretty good. (A hard rain in the desert is much lighter than a light rain in Louisiana)  With the rain always comes lots of lightning and possible flooding.  When we got back to the campground the wind was blowing pretty hard.  It was shaking the camper pretty good. We were glad that the storm did not last very long.

Saturday, July 15 2006

Visited Roswell New Mexico.  Not that impressive.

 Made the drive from Roswell to Carlsbad.  Found a campground then went out to the River walk.  We had been to Carlsbad about 12 years ago.  It has really grown a lot.  It is a very nice town.  The River walk to beautiful.  They have to best playground at the park that I have ever seen anywhere.  They even have a recreation center where it is free to go play basketball, racquetball, Ping-Pong, foosball ect.  Outside they have a really nice skateboard park.  The entire program is set up as a no tolerance, drug free zone.  It is manned by volunteers and meant to give kids some place to go to stay out of trouble.  It is really nice.

We found a drive in movie theater and since the kids have never even seen one, we thought we would take them to see a movie.  So at 11:00-1:00 we sat in the truck watching the movie "Cars".  Cute movie, it was really neat because the movie was about this area of the country we just came through and about Route 66.  We have drove on parts of the route, and stayed in an old campground on the route as well.  Good movie, go see it.