July 6, 2008
Munds Park to Bluewater State Park, NM
We got the day off to a great start by going to Munds Park Community Church with my dad. They did an awesome 4th of July service, complete with the choir singing the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, and Marine fight songs. During each of the songs, people who had served in that branch of the armed forces stood up. Here's a picture of my dad standing up during the Navy song:
Then we had lunch at Mike and Ronda's in Flagstaff--Fabulous food!!!!


After saying goodbye to my dad, we started on the next leg of our journey.


We drove to Petrified National Forest and walked the Long Logs trail. We looked at the agate house, and then drove through the rest of the park. It was hot so we decided to stay in air-conditioned comfort. I still don't really get how silica trapped in a log skeleton can dry out and turn into stone, but oh well.
Then we drove through the Painted Desert. Wow! I might even like it more than the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful.

You know, time seems to get away from us. We still needed to get to a State Park that we weren't totally sure where it was located (Mapquest can give some pretty weird directions sometimes.) And we hadn't had dinner. We stopped in Gallup at a restaurant that had pretty little blue lights hanging from the ceiling. The food was ok--Jenika and I split a BLT, which came as a BL (we think it's because of the tomato recall, but the waitress didn't comment on the fact that they weren't putting tomatoes on their bacon, lettuce, and TOMATO sandwiches.). John devours his food so quickly since his growth spurt that I'm not really sure if anyone knows if it was good or not. Dirk scored with a green chili burro. Jenika ordered rainbow sherbet and got strawberry ice cream, and I ordered a flan, sigh. I wish I hadn't.

Anyway, it took kind of a long time, and the writing was on the wall: we were going to have to put up the tent in the dark, not my favorite thing to do. After a 10-mile detour, we pulled into the dark campground, drove around till we found a place we liked (not that we could really tell, because it was dark.) But we were the only ones on our loop, so that was really nice. We got out of the truck and set up our tent in the dark, oh, and it was raining, too. But we set it up in record time and nothing got really wet. It wasn't raining terribly hard.