On Sunday we left the Canyon De Chelly and drove south to visit The Painted Desert and The Petrified Forest National Park. The only way to get to the nearby campground was to enter the North end of the park, drive through the park , along the scnic route and out the South end of the Park, where there is a free campground. So we stopped and saw some of the attractions there. We were amazed at the rock forms and colours of The Painted Desert, mostly soft strata of many diferent colours, white, bluish, red, pink and purple could be seen. We were surprised to learn that much of the white/grey layer was bentonite, which is what they make cat litter from.
We camped in the somewhat exposed free campground, and were surprised to find that the next door trailer was owned by a very nice English couple, who had also bought their own trailer and truck and were doing the same thing as us. Except they tour for six months at a time and having explored the West Coast are now moving towards the East Coast. So we had a fair old chin wag in the evening. They actually come from York, just down the road from us!
The weather had taken a turn for the worse and it was very windy (gusts up to 57m.ph.), which was not very nice. However, after another coffee time with our English neighbours, we set out to look at the Petrified Forest bit of the National Park. It was amazing to see lots of tree trunks that had been growing 225 million years ago just lying round on the ground. The trees having grown, fallen down, been buried in mud, which has turned to rock, come back to the surface and been laid bare in our time. We also saw some more bizarre rock formations.
After travelling through the park we moved further west to Winslow and camped at the Homoluvi Ruins State Park, a very open, but pleasant, if pricy, campground.
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