Day 8 – Petroglyphs and Petrified Wood

Our first stop today was in Old Town Albuquerque New Mexico.  This is a popular tourist destination because it has several blocks of historic adobe style buildings located around a central plaza.  The oldest building was the San Felipe de Neri church built in 1793.

New Mexico is known for its chiles and so what better place to find chilies . . . in food!  For lunch we stopped at a local Mexican restaurant (we knew it had to be good because the parking lot was packed and most of the clientele spoke Spanish).   Delicioso!

While still in New Mexico we stopped at the Petroglyph National Monument where you can find around 20,000 images carved by early American Indians.  We hiked along several trails and saw lots of images carved in the stones.  It was amazing!  We saw some images that were easy to decipher (i.e. some animals and people) and we saw other images that we could only speculate their meaning.

Click here to see all of our pictures of petroglyphs.

We spent several hours in the car, but we continued to be awed by the beautiful sights along the road.  The landscape is very different in each place we travel through.  We also happened upon the Continental Divide (the line that divides the flow of water between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans).

Our second big stop for the day (the first being the petroglyphs) was at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. This park contains one of the world’s largest and most colorful concentrations of petrified wood.  The trees here are over 200 million years old!!!  The wood was buried under water and then covered in volcanic ash.  “The mineral silica, dissolved from volcanic ash and hardened into crystalline quartz, replaced 80-90% of the organic wood. Minor minerals, such as iron, manganese, and carbon add the rainbow of colors.”