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Phoenix is far from Petrified

From Albuquerque, we drove to Arizona, through the Red Rock State Park and then onto Holbrook, which is the most dead town in all of America. Holbrook is a town with dinosaur statues and tepee’s. We walked down main street and almost felt like the human race became extinct over-night and that the cretaceous period came back to life. The reason we stopped off here is because of its close proximity to the ‘Petrified Forest National Park‘.

Approximately, 225 million years ago, these huge trees grew in the area, and as they fell, they became covered with mud and volcanic ash allowing silica to seep into the wood. Eventually, crystallizing into quartz. This left a most beautiful and abstract coloured logs strewn across the Painted Desert. It was hard to tell they were once trees. The Painted desert was a fantastic vision, layers upon layers of different colours made by carbon, iron and manganese, which makes the sand formations appear, blue, green and purple. It was windy the day we were there, so it was hard to stay outside, the wind gusted up to 50 mph!

From Holbrook we drove into Phoenix, the capital city of Arizona. We really liked Phoenix with its bright colours, palm trees, flowers everywhere and non-stop sunshine. It took us an hour to reach downtown Phoenix after we passed the ‘Entering Phoenix’ sign! We found our hotel easy enough, and we were pleasantly surprised at just how great it was. We booked our hotel room from this site: http://www.phoenixluxuryhotels.com, which our friends told us about. Very nice accommodations.

Tomorrow we plan to drive the Apache Trail; it’s an ancient Indian path, which take you through the Superstition Mountains. We’ll stop at the Goldfield Ghost Town, a real live goldmine back in the late 1800’s. Then we’ll drive to Canyon Lake and onto Tortilla Flat, which was another mining town and on up into the mountains.

Related posts:

1. Hall of Flame Museum in Phoenix
2. Blame it on the Vortex
3. Sand Surf Cape Town
4. Visiting Knoxville Finally

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