Saturday, October 15, 2016

Painted Desert and Petrified National Forest

Now, here is why it's taken so long for me to get caught up:

The first time we stopped at Heber City UT this summer (outside Salt Lake), we asked one of the park workers what trailers people liked.  He said the Lance was both popular and well built, and we went into Salt Lake to a dealer to take a look as neither of us had ever heard of it.  (The RPOD was fine when it was just me and the two dogs; with an additional human and two more dogs, it wasn't working all that well.)

I contacted the dealer in Phoenix where I bought the RPOD to see if they carried Lance.  They did.  After numerous back and forth emails and phone calls, we agreed on a deal, with pickup at the end of the summer in Phoenix as we came back to Deming.  The day we arrived in Mesa, it was 106 degrees and trailer A/C isn't designed for this.  After a miserable night, we went to the dealer and dropped the RPOD.

Since, when we left months earlier, I hadn't planned to trade rigs, I didn't have the title.  Back to Deming (329 miles) over Labor Day weekend.  When the DMV opened on Tuesday, we learned they had done a software upgrade over the weekend.  No one knew how to do anything.  Took an hour just to get a duplicate title.  Mike said I was incandescent at the window, waiting and waiting and waiting.

Back to Phoenix (did I mentioned it's 329 miles) and then unload everything in the RPOD and dump it into the Lance.  Chaos.  We drove to Payson to a park and collapsed.  

From Payson, we went to Painted Desert/Petrified Forest, two more national parks on my wish list.  My photos don't do justice to Painted Desert; the colors are too subtle for my camera to do them justice.  




Native Americans inhabited this area for thousands of years.  I would think there had to have been more water available than there is now to support a thriving community.









Route 66 cut across part of the Petrified Forest/Painted Desert.  There is an old Studebaker which was apparently abandoned decades ago beside the roadbed.  





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