What a difference a day makes

Again we had time today to do some sightseeing, so we only covered 220 miles (352 kms). The weather had also changed dramatically. Yesterday we were in Santa Fe in lovely weather wearing t-shirts and hoodies, whereas their forecast today was for 5" of snow. Similarly for us, we were to expect heavy rainfall for much of the day.

goodbye t-shirt weather!

At the Arizona visitors centre the lady suggested that we not take our planned scenic route as the rainfall on those steep roads might make driving difficult. We opted instead to continue on interstate 40 and went to the Petrified Forest National Park. Although I took photos, some of which I'll add here, the website will probably give you a better idea of the landscape. Greg said he felt like we'd landed on the moon! It started raining as we drove in, and it continued to rain for most of the time we drove the 28-mile road, but it was still an amazing sight. We highly recommend it.

In the foreground are petrified fallen trees that are quite large

In person you can see why it's called the "painted desert"

The darkened area is a huge petrified fallen tree

We were quite close to this raven but he wasn't bothered

Definitely nothing like we've ever seen before

The next two hours we drove through a mix of weather and terrain. Our landscape changed to pine forests and we saw fresh snowfall on the trees and on the ground. Although I admit it looked very Christmassy, the purpose of our trip was to move to warmer climes so it didn't sit well with me. We travelled some beautiful rolling hills, from a highest point of 7700 ft above sea level to our stop for the evening in Payton, at 4700 ft. Now we only have about 100 miles more to get to Phoenix.

I'll end today with some signs we found interesting and humorous. In amongst the miles of rock formations in the park, one sign said "falling rock". Really? I could have guessed that! But our favourite was the one that said "elk crossing when light flashing", and it looked like there was a crosswalk marked on the road. Boy, they have intelligent elk here if they can train them to activate the lights before they cross!