Holbrook, Arizona, United States
Today we moved from Grants, NM to Holbrook, AZ, with a main
eye to touring Petrified Forest National Park.
As with yesterday, I put most of the comments on the
photos. One funny story is that at one
of the stops along the Painted Desert portion of the park (northern end is
Painted Desert; southern end is Petrified Forest), we ran into a guy named Jim,
who we ran into several times on Monday.
I think this must happen all the time—parties touring Route 66 at
roughly the same time run into each other over and over. We first ran into Jim on Monday at the
restored filling station in Vega, Tx, and then
at the Bent Door gas station (which you may remember from my photos), and then
at Midway. He told us that he would be
going as far as Flagstaff, then turning northward to head home. (He’s from Michigan.) We last saw him at the top of the hill
leading down into Albuquerque, where he had pulled off to the side (presumably
to look at a map). We did not see him at
all yesterday, so it was pretty funny to run into him today.
Turned out he stayed two nights in
Albuquerque, and was catching up with us today.
We ran into him several times along the park drive; at one,
he heard me grousing to Tim that the answer to the Virtual Geocache question was not on the sign indicated on the cache page,
and Jim asked what that was about. (For
those of you unfamiliar with the madness of geocaching, a virtual cache is one
which has no physical presence. You look
at some feature of something and then email an answer to a question about it to
the cache owner.) I explained caching to
him in brief. The next time we ran into
him it was at the Route 66 display (Route 66 used to run right through the
park—totally gone now but for a line of telephone poles). Jim started asking me again about geocaching. As it happened, there was an actual physical
cache right there, so I told him I could show him, if I could find it. He helped look, and, as it happened, was the
one to make the grab. So he signed the
log, and along with our other accomplishments of the day, I initiated Jim from
Michigan into geocaching.
(Note: We never saw
him again after this; maybe the experience of geocaching wasn’t as much fun as
I thought! Actually, he was headed all
the way to Flagstaff today, with another stop on the way—WAY more ambitious
than we were. Flagstaff is another 100
miles.)
Another funny story is that we got extremely confused when
we arrived at the park, because there is a clock on the entry sign, and the
clock said 12:10, but it was 1:10—or so we thought.
We knew we hadn’t changed time zones;
however, it turns out (we knew this but forgot), Arizona does not go on
daylight savings time, so we gained an extra hour, and it was, in fact, only
12:10. Turned out to be a good thing,
because the park closes at 6, and we were there almost to the bell. We did not do everything there was to do—we
skipped three hikes: one one-mile hike,
one 1.6-mile hike, and one .75-mile hike.
It was raining hard at the 1.0 site (and that one was sharply down on
the way out and sharply up on the way back—very time consuming. Rain was blowing right into our faces in a
most uncomfortable way, or we would have done the .75 hike. Turned out to be just as well, because we
would not have made it to the last visitors center or the hike to see the
really big petrified trees if we had. We
spent 6 hours, and that is really the bare minimum. You really need at least one full day; a day
and a half would probably be better. At
least we now know what time it is where we are!
Our hotel is one of the three remaining Wigwam Motels on
Route 66; this one is number 6. We will
also be staying in one in California.
Many photos taken here, unsurprisingly.
11.5 hours today from hotel to hotel; slightly longer than
the 11 hours each of Monday and Tuesday.
Also hit 425 pictures—a pretty big day, even for me! Even Tim took 59 photos, which might be an
all-time record for him!
Tomorrow is another big driving day—nothing but Route 66
landmarks coming our way.
2025-05-22