Sun., Sept 25 - Flagstaff to Albuquerque

After breakfast this morning we headed out for Albuquerque, NM. On the way, we planned on stopping at the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forrest to kind of break up the drive. We had done this on a past trip, but couldn’t exactly remember the order in which we did it. According to the map, it seemed logical that we would go through the Painted Desert first. It was a bit off the highway, but should only take about an hour to get there and back, still leaving enough time to drive around a bit. We passed a sign for the Petrified Forrest, but it was off the road in the other direction, so we figured we would make a big loop and see it all. Well, we drove and drove for over an hour, and no Painted Desert. It was beautiful country for sure, but way off the beaten path. There was no place to turn around until we were almost to Second Mesa (check out a map!). We found a connection to highway 191 and headed south, back to highway 40, hoping to find the turn off for the Painted Desert before we went back to the Petrified Forrest :/ After a total of about 3 hours of driving so far, we were back in Holbrook – not far from our KOA last night!! But, there it was, The Petrified Forrest via the Painted Desert Loop!

The scenery is absolutely gorgeous!!! I wish that our camera could capture the depth and colors that our eyes can see! We stopped at almost all of the look outs. We walked around some Pueblo Indian ruins, and saw some really nice petroglyphs. There was a sign posted that warned of extremely aggressive bees along the trail, and sure enough, Barb and I were “buzzed” a number of times! After the 27 mile loop we headed on to the Petrified Forrest. The park closed at 6pm, and we didn’t want to miss anything. No time to stop for gas (not that there was any for miles and miles anyway!). We arrived with about 45 minutes to spare and hit the gift shop before it closed. Then we had plenty of time to walk around all of the fallen trees and take lots of pictures. Now our mission was to find gas (we really needed it) and highway 40 J The only way to the highway was back through Holbrook ! Ha ha ha!!!

So, we were finally on our way to Albuquerque! With a stop in Gallup for dinner, our ETA was 11:45 pm. It turned out to be quite a lot of driving – 542 miles, but we saw some really beautiful country! Tomorrow, it’s off to Alamosa, CO.