Hoover Dam

This is the new bridge over the Colorado at Hoover Dam. After seeing it, we decided we were NOT going to be the first ones across the bridge!

Lake Mead is REALLY low! We haven't ever seen it this low. This was taken while driving across Hoover Dam. The white all the way around is the high water mark!!

We drove under a portion of the new bridge. It is WA-A-A-Y up there.

We drove full circle: Kingman to Las Vegas to Laughlin back to Kingman. This picture was taken after we left Laughlin on our way to Kingman. We are now in Phoenix for the Winter. We brought cooler weather with us, highs have only been in the 60s since we got here. We're looking forward to good visits with Brian and Grayson while we're here.

Painted Desert & Petrified Forest

The Painted Desert is really pretty with changing colors of grays, pinks and reds! At one point you can see 120 miles across the desert to the San Francisco Mountains north of Flagstaff. That distance doesn't show on a photograph, so I didn't even try!

This is Pilot Peak, also in the Painted Desert. This park is worth the trip. We are loving National Parks/ Monuments since we got our Senior Pass. The pass cost $10 and we get into all parks and monuments for $0.00, we just show the pass!!!! We recommend it to anyone over 62.

The Petrified Forest was really cool! I've wanted to go for a long time, ever since I collected rocks as a little girl (that's a long time!) There were full logs and lots of pieces. This picture is of a log bridge. The log is suspended over a small gully and is about 15 feet long! It's a bit hard to see the log in the picture, because it's the same color as the rock around it, but it was impressive.

This picture shows the wood grain in one of the logs. The petrified rocks in Arizona have lots of red in them. They're really pretty. We went to a film at the visitor's center before we started our tour. We learned that the trees started out in a huge swamp and were submerged in water and eventually covered with silt (and then dirt, rocks, etc. when the swamp dried up). All the debris covering them preserved them for us to see now!

This is a log field! Lots of really big logs that we got to walk through. It was really neat to walk through so many rock logs! This was a neat place to visit.

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New Mexico

It has been way too long since I updated this blog! After Durango, CO we drove to Santa Fe, NM. It was a beautiful drive through high desert valleys and some really pretty valleys. Santa Fe is an artist community, listed only behind New York and San Francisco in number of Art Galleries! It isn't a really big town and the building codes say everything must be built according to a specific southwest architectural code. Lots of buildings are the pueblo style. It makes for a really neat community. While in Santa Fe, we also drove on the Turquoise Trail. It is quite a drive going all the way from Santa Fe to I-40 east of Albuquerque. There are lots of galleries along this
drive also and it is really pretty just east of the Sandia Mountains. After leaving Santa Fe we drove to Roswell, NM. That's where Howard went to school and where Loriann was born. The area had really changed since Howard was there, but we were able to go out to Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell campus where we got a really good tour of the department by the head of the department. She was so enthusiastic about the program and the students it was really cool to visit with her. We also went to the UFO Museum while we were in Roswell -- that was interesting! We learned lots of new things! From Roswell we drove to Carlsbad where we went through the
Caverns. That was REALLY cool. The big room took well over an hour to walk around (over 6000 square feet big!) After touring the big room, we stayed and watched the bats come out at dusk -- we watched for about 35 minutes as they swarmed out of the natural entrance to the cave. They were still coming by the droves with seemingly no end in sight, so we left! That was really something worth seeing!!!!!!!! From Carlsbad we drove to Alamogordo, NM so I could get my new military ID card. Mine expires this birthday so we drove to the White Sands Missile Range and got me legal. We toured the museum while there and learned a lot of the history of the Missile Range. Then on the way we went to the White Sands National Monument and drove through the park. Lots of white sand!!!! They actually plow it like snow where it has drifted across the roads. Pretty cool! We are now in Albuquerque for about a week. We were here two years ago and we really like the area.