Petrified Forest and Painted Desert and the bad news!

Yesterday we drove through the town of Holbrook on the way to the Petrified Forest National Park.   It is a very small town with lots of motels, one grocery store, lots of rock shops, a couple of banks and so on.  The main road through Holbrook is U.S. Route 66!  Route 66 encompasses 2,448 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles originally.  The interesting historic Wigwam Motel is on Route 66 in Holbrook!

From there we went on a drive through the Petrified Forest National Park.  Our first stop was to the Rainbow Forest Museum.  There were a lot of pieces of trees laying around that were over 200 million years old!  The logs were buried in layers of sediment along a river with silica gradually replacing organic material.  The rainbow of colors come from trace minerals such as iron and manganese oxides!  They are beautiful and mother nature has polished them to a brilliant shine!

 As we drove through the park we were being chased by thunder, lightning and rain!  Most of the hard rain went around us!

The Painted Desert is at one end of the 28 mile road but you can only see a small portion from the road.  We stopped at the Painted Desert Inn, and took a look inside.  There were only 6 very small rooms in the inn, a nice lounge, eating area and beautiful views!  It no longer functions as an inn but as a museum and you can look around.

The colors in the painted desert are amazing. It was a cloudy, rainy day and I'm sure on a sunny day it would even be more beautiful!

This morning we left Holbrook and were planning to drive to Santa Fe, New Mexico.  It was a beautiful day and I took some pictures leaving Arizona...

And arriving in New Mexico!

But the bad news...about 12 miles into New Mexico we heard a loud pop!  We had a blow out on the RV on the driver side.  Ted got pulled over just past the weigh station and managed to back into an area of the weigh station not being used, all the while the trucks were whizzing past us leaving the weigh station.  The tire man came to fix the tire and now for the really bad news...it was another failed bearing!  But they never fail they tell us...sure, this is our second!

So he managed to chain up the axle so it wouldn't touch the ground and we followed the tire guy as we limped 4 miles to the next exit in Gallup and to a repair shop.  Of course it is Sunday and it wasn't open but luckily, the man and his wife happened to drive by and noticed us (all 55 feet or so) in front of his shop and pulled in to see what was going on.  We have an appointment for someone to come out in the morning to see if they have a bearing that will work for us.  Last time it took a few days to get the bearing so we "camped" by the side of the road between Las Vegas and Pahrump, Nevada!  We also will have to buy a new tire and order a new rim from Indiana!

We are safely in an RV park in Gallup which we had been to before, and it is a very nice park.  Tonight they had a man singing country songs, they had a barbecue and an ice cream social.  I cooked our dinner but we attended the social and ate ice cream and talked to some nice people!

Ted says..."Life ain't too Grand today!"