Day 198: Petrified Forest National Park

Painted Desert

Petrified forest is one of the best national parks even if they do close early to make sure that nobody steals a piece of 250 million year old tree during the night.  It's really impressive to walk through the site of a huge forest that's been turned to stone, but the park has a lot of other things as well: a beautiful adobe inn that was constructed in the Depression and only used for a few years, the Painted Desert which is desert in more colours than a paintbox, ancient pueblos, including one made of petrified wood, and a fossil museum.

This is pretty much all that's left of Route 66 around here.

...don't even think about it, or else...

...this might happen to you!

Of course, you'd need a truck to get that lot away.

Petrified forest is one of the few parks where you can't camp in case you take advantage of the opportunity to steal the trees (they really have a thing about this), so we had to go to a KOA. This is a big chain of campgrounds across the US.  They turn out to be pretty nice because they have things like a children's playground, heated shower rooms, a dinner stand that did fairly reasonable food....  nicer than a National Park campground, actually, at twice the price!