We are driving around towing a 20+ year old RV. It’s in great shape. It’s a great living space. But we are starting to think travel trailers aren’t actually made to travel. Every day on the road is an earthquake. Every day after we park, we open the doors wondering what we’ll find. There’s almost always some new microdamage. Today, the first leg of our trip was actually one of the smoothest roads we’ve been on yet, but it had two massive potholes/bumps. One of them was big enough to rip open a cabinet door and our induction cooktop slid out and shattered. There was glass everywhere – the countertop, the floor, the couch, the slideout. I’m sure we share some blame for storing a heavier object up high, but wow.

We’ve also had a piece of furniture slide into a cabinet and gouge my fresh paint job, our blinds shed a piece or two with every trip (to be fair, they are the wrong kind of blinds for this kind of travel), we’ve lost 3 exterior light covers…the list goes on. Our NM campground had insanely high water pressure and now the hot water tap in the kitchen sink runs wide open at all times, so we had to close the valve under the sink. Two stabilizers have broken. But we use the induction cooktop for everything, so this one really hurts. Fortunately we’ll be at a longer-term stay soon and can order a new one!

If there was one upgrade I wish we’d done on the camper, it’s better suspension. We already know that this camper won’t work for us much longer and that makes it harder to invest money into upgrades. We were aware that the “earthquake” would be a challenge, this isn’t our first trip with this camper, but it’s amazing to compare this to boat life – the boat really took a beating but things never moved!

After we parked at our campsite today, we still had quite a bit of daylight left. We decided to begin our tour of Petrified Forest National Park, starting by driving all the way back to the north end at the Painted Desert and working our way south. At our very first stop, I identified the landscape as matching my grandparent’s slide from their trip in 1962. Fun fact: the Petrified Forest became a national park in 1962, so my family was probably one of the first visitors of the newly minted National Park!

At this end of the park, there are mostly just viewpoints to stop at.

Old Route 66 crosses through the park (as does the freeway) and the old road is commemorated with an antique Studebaker and telephone poles to mark the route.

We explored the Puerco Pueblo ruins, although our 1-year old would constantly run the opposite direction we were going.

In fact, he really just wanted to make friends with the ginormous crow.

We were nearing dinner, so we fit in one more stop before heading back to the camper. I was excited to see the Newspaper Rock petroglyphs, which are etched into the “desert varnish” that blackens some rock faces. The first photo is your eyeball view of the rocks from high up on the overlook, but fortunately the park put several binoculars on stands so that you can get a better view of the petroglyphs.

Our campsite is located just south of the park, there is a museum (free RV parking, no hookups) or the gift shop (we paid $26.50 per night for an electric site). Weirdly, at this point, we hadn’t seen any petrified wood up close, although there’s tons of it lining the road in the southern half of the park. However, this is what our campsite looked like.

We also had our first really epic sunset that night.

The next day we got an earlier start so we could see the rest of the park before nap time. I wanted to do the Crystal Forest Trail. We got an up close look at the petrified wood – all the little stones on the ground are chips of petrified wood.

It is not hard to find petrified wood here. This view is very common. Also, the “petrification” is more of a replacement process, as minerals replaced the decaying organic material, which all happened well before the T-Rex was stomping around.

I like this piece because it’s really representative of the full spectrum of different colored minerals, plus you can still see the texture of the bark. But to be honest, I found the petrified wood pretty boring.

We stopped at the agate bridge, which is a (now fully supported) log that the land eroded out from under it, forming a bridge. Then we headed out to the Blue Mesa, which is where I was hoping to find another 1962 slide. Part of this area is petrified wood on pedestals, as the limestone erodes around them.

We were really high up, and the landscape was kind of other-worldly. Our truck at the top of the ridge gives a little sense of scale.

The main overlook didn’t have our slide, but a tiny pull-off a couple hundred yards down the road was our scene! I think the most interesting part of this photo is that there’s a big log at the bottom edge of the slide that’s still in the exact same spot today.

This was a very cool view. I love the striped landscape.

By this point we were very much pushing the limits of our nap schedule, so we drove back to the campground. We’d more or less seen everything we wanted to see, so that afternoon we let the kid run around the museum and gift shop areas. I started discovering little bits of petrified wood in the dirt (it is illegal to take it from the park, but the museum/gift shop are private land). The more I discovered, the more fun I had looking for petrified wood.

I ended up with…too many rocks.

The best piece I found – and I still can’t believe I found it – was mostly buried in the dirt right behind our campsite. In fact, I wish I’d taken a photo of it in the dirt because I feel like I need to prove that I seriously just found this piece at our site, but it didn’t look like anything special when I found it. I pulled it out and cleaned it up and it’s amazing! It’s got all the mineral colors, shows the tree rings, and has a bit of the bark texture. These tiny hands are definitely helping me showcase my find, and not trying to steal it away from me.

Anyway, we had a great time here but we had almost no cell service and we need internet to get any work done. We opted to move a little further the next day, to stage us for an easier final leg of the trip.

Random facts that don’t fit anywhere else:
– When we drove back into the park on the day we arrived, we realized that the truck said it was 2:30, but our phones said it was 1:30pm. So we had to ask the ranger what time it was. He laughed and told us that AZ doesn’t follow daylight savings, but the reservations do, so it would depend on what cell towers our phones were picking up. Then he told us it was 3:30! “Wait, no, no, it’s 13:30!” he corrected himself. We’re in our third time zone, but AZ is pretty messy with some areas following DST and some not.