rocks, rocks, and more rocks

yesterday morning we woke up late, tired from hours of blogging and AIMing. we left flagstaff for sedona, a town south of flagstaff that crops up among red mesas. all the architecture is blended into the surroundings - lots of red adobe pueblo style houses. everything is red and green, somehow. supposedly sedona is a place where the earth's energy congregates in an especially high concentration, in "vortexes" where you can commune with spirits or something like that. mostly it was just really cool looking. we grabbed lunch at a kind of funky cafe on the way to montezuma's castle, which was built into cliffs by native american communities a long time ago.

our plan was to get as far east as possible because there wasn't really anything to see or any place to stay between flagstaff and albuquerque (where we were supposed to be tomorrow by noon). oddly enough, we had a really busy day and saw lots of cool places - but just no places that we stayed at long.

after montezuma we looped up to see the Meteor Crater. see, somewhere in arizona, there's a meteor crater. it's an odd little landmark because it's privately owned and it's somewhere between a tourist trap and a natural phenomenon totally worth seeing. you turn off the main road, past very corny signs advertising "it's out of this world!" and after five miles, you reach an oddly military-looking complex of buildings surrounded by fences and barbed wire. after paying an entrance fee, you get to go up and see the crater's rim. the crater is a mile in diameter, and the displays point out that it's 3.14 miles around the rim. it's really quite bizarre.

unfortunately, there had been a wildfire in southern arizona that was polluting the air everywhere we went (and by polluting the air i mean polluting my lungs too). it also happened to do very odd things to the sunset, which happened at least an hour earlier than it should have. it was kind of a nuclear sunset, to be honest.

mostly what you need to know about wednesday is that we saw a lot of rocks - rocks in sedona, rocks that were houses, rocks that had been rearranged by a giant meteor into a crater, rocks that had once been trees, and then rocks that were pretty and "painted" looking. after the crater, we saw the petrified forest, which i still don't understand. when i was a kid, i imagined that the petrified forest was lots of trees still standing up with leaves and everything, only made out of rocks - a sort of fairy-tale with emeralds for leaves or something like that. but in reality (i say this in case you are idiotic like me), the petrified forest is just a lot of stumps that have crystallized into rocks, lying around on the ground in a very strange-looking alien desert. the park ranger in the gift shop looked strikingly like nels (if you know nels from stanford, aka "weird facial-hair guy"), which didn't help the alienness of it all.

the petrified forest is right next to the painted desert. what i've learned about driving across country is that you will be going through what is literally the middle of nowhere (dust, a few rocks of a boring color, and little scrubs and bushes) and then all of a sudden something gorgeous and odd will appear in front of you. hence the painted desert - another sort of martian landscape, and the last that we will see for a while, i suspect.

we kept driving as it got dark (since we were heading east, we were actually fleeing the sunshine for darker lands), stopping at a subway store in navajo, AZ for dinner. we entered new mexico at dark and saw absolutely nothing but a few stars and billboards until we hit albuquerque. since we really had nothing to do, we decided to find a place to camp. we drove around the cibola national forest looking for a campsite that our map claimed existed, but it kind of lied, and we almost decided to sleep in the parking lot of the ranger station but dan was driven by instinct and a sign we'd seen earlier to look for another option. ta-da! we ended up sleeping in the car in the turquoise trails RV park, planning on leaving in the morning to avoid having to pay the fee. that failed and the very crunchy camp owner stopped us as we pulled out of our parking spot at 6:30 in the morning (woken by the sun).

on a sort of random note, we just ate breakfast at my very first wafflehouse ever. i feel like only silvia really cares, but i realized sitting in the wafflehouse that we really are on our way east. when the wafflehouse waitress said to me at one point, "you don't want no more, sugar?" i knew i was headed into unfamiliar territory.