Wandering West, Day 15, Thursday, July 8, 2021
Today was a day for a little bit of sightseeing and a whole lot of driving. The day took us to our final national park visit of the trip. We’ve visited six national parks and one national monument in the last fifteen days. I’d say we saw a lot!
We left Meteor Crater RV Park in Winslow, Arizona around 7:30 am. Nope, we didn’t go see the meteor crater, we were all ready to hit the road, we had miles to drive and other things to see. The first item on our agenda was to visit Petrified Forest National Park. This park was a great one to visit on a travel day because you basically start at one end of the park (we started at the south entrance ) and you drive around 28-miles through the park, just stopping at overlooks or short walks to see the petrified wood, old pueblos, and the landscape of the Painted Desert. The visitor centers also had models of dinosaurs which made Noah particularly happy.
We entered the park through the south entrance, near Holbrook, AZ. If I had remembered this from my prior research I would have insisted that we stop in Holbrook to check out a couple of really cool Route 66 sights. We passed by the Wigwam Motel which is an iconic stop along Route 66. It was a popular motel chain back in the day but there are only three of these left now in the U.S., two of them being on Route 66. Now, we also saw a poor guy who had driven his fifth wheel trailer under a gas station awning that he couldn’t quite clear. Bad day for him.
We spent a couple of hours exploring the visitor centers (can’t miss the pressed penny machines or the passport book stamps!) and driving through the park, then we continued our journey toward home. Thankfully it was an uneventful remainder of the day, well other than Kevin taking the wrong exit and heading back west for about six miles. No biggie though, we ended up catching up to each other due to some heavy construction traffic just before Albuquerque. We also decided we just couldn’t eat another Subway sandwich for lunch (every fuel station we’ve stopped at has a Subway), so we found a Crackerbarrel in Gallup, NM, and enjoyed a good meal on this travel day.
Tonight we found a little RV park in Moriarty, NM to stop at for the night. We’ll rest up and get ready for another day of driving tomorrow. We traveled 321 miles today. We still have 811 miles to home which means there is still plenty of adventures to be had.