RV Vacation of 2016: Second leg, AZ

From White Sands NM, we drove to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Parks, which are really the same place, just on opposite sides of the highway. They are both pretty darned good destination parks, but Petrified Forest just isn't "overwhelming," it is more like, "boggling." It is very interesting, but it seems pretty overshadowed by the Painted Desert, which is very, very beatiful.  My oldest plopped down and just soaked it in, stating that she wished she could just sit all day and look at it.  I recognize that fascination with the "lonely places." It really is surreal in person, and bigger than any postcard or picture can do justice to of course.  The diversity of landscape truly illustrates an amazing creator.

A petrified log.

I have no idea why this boy is saluting, other than just to say, He is really weird...

From there, of course, we went to... where else, but the Grand Canyon!  The Grand Canyon always presents a problem to me; it is sooo grand, and such a canyon, that I kind of don't know what to do with it.  I see it, and I feel that doing anything less than hiking it, rafting it, repelling down it, thoroughly exploring it, etc is sort of doing it an injustice.  So I pretty much find one spot, walk up to it and take a few pictures of it and leave.  I figure the less time I spend there, the less of an injustice I have done to it.  I know, it makes no sense at all... Anyway, how else can you justify spending just 3 hours at the Grand Canyon?

My mountain goats!  This really was an edge of the cliff, not phony like the photo below.  It was a LOOONG ways down.

HELP!!

We reckoned by the Park Signs that from where we were standing (south rim) to the opposite rim was about the distance from my house to my office; about 20 miles. A little hard to fathom...

Another fun Arizona thing to do was explore the famous route 66.  We didn't go out of our way to "Get our kicks on Route 66," but we camped in Williams, AZ and went to their downtown area and it was a really neat little touristy town.  

We saw some other Route 66 artifacts like these iconic little concrete Wig-Wams.  When I saw these, I just shut the old RV down, right smack dab in the middle of the street to take this picture below.

The office is to the right of the picture; then what isn't in the picture is on the other side of the office is an old tow truck that looks like the one in the movie "Cars."  I didn't get a picture of it because by then everybody else driving was getting irritated at me, but I shouted "Hey, kids, look! Its TATER!!!"  They thought it was SOOOO funny that I called him Tater; I guess it is 'Mater, rather than Tater..." Anyway, it made their day...

But with more time, I would have liked to do some more exploration of the Historic Route 66.  I thought it was really interesting; we just stumbled upon it inadvertently.