We started the day having brunch with my mom's cousin and husband in Albuquerque. We met at Church Street Café, which was a cute place that had tons of dining rooms! It had converted into a restaurant from a house and we dined in a wonderfully open and decorated room with a warm adobe-style fireplace.
Papa Ku, yours truly, Art, Christine, Jason, Hojung, and Mama Ku
Jason's shnoz
The original fishbowl effect, ornament style
Old town Albuquerque with an enormous decorated tree
We left Albuquerque around noon and headed west down 40 to Flagstaff. Lots of pretty views of mountains and canyonish features.
Lots of trains
Church Rock (see it there in the distance?)
We stumbled upon two treasures en route. The first was the Petrified Forest National Park, which includes the Painted Desert. Petrified trees are the result of trees or tree-like plants having completely transitioned to stone by the process of permineralization. All the organic materials have been replaced with minerals (mostly a silicate, such as quartz), while retaining the original structure of the stem tissue. Pretty damn cool!
This was a book available at the park gift store :-P In case you want to be able to pair animal footprints and poop!
We didn't have time to go through the entire park, but we saw the Painted Desert and it was beautiful!
Hootie seein the sights!
Nobody else got out of the car at this point so we had a photo opp!
Jason and Hojung
Parentals
The second surprise was the Meteor Crater. This crater was created about 50,000 years ago and is about 1 mile across with a 3 mile circumference. This was super cool to see and we were lucky to catch it because we arrived right at 5:00pm, which is when they stopped selling tickets. They were kind enough to let us in and they didn't officially close until 5:30pm, so we had 30 minutes to soak it in right as the sun was setting!
This is the largest discovered fragment of the 150 foot meteor that created Meteor Crater
This brick wall had a window cut out to perfectly frame the stunning view!
We arrived in Flagstaff around 6:30pm where Ben, Jacob, and the pupples were waiting for us. We plopped our stuff in the rooms, said hi to the pups, and went to dinner at a diner across from our inn. The diner was classically equipped with a jukebox and tons of 50s / 60s celebrity photos embellishing every wall. We got a good ol' American food fix, hand-spun milkshakes and all.
Tomorrow will be lots of pictures of the Grand Canyon and Sedona too if we have time! I can't wait!! :-D
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