The petrified Forest National Park

Roses are red, violets are blue, the Painted Desert, is waiting for you. Don't forget to click the pics

I know this looks like a truck stop, but its actually a Walmart parking lot. And this wasn't all the trucks. This many more were scattered around the parking lot, so it looks like the truckers are doing all they can to keep the shelves stocked up. I also counted 16 RVs when I left the Walmart parking lot early this morning.

I pulled out of the Walmart in Grants, New Mexico, just after sunrise this morning, and the parking lot was full of RVs and semi-trucks. And speaking of semi's, Interstate 40 was full of them. I've only seen more trucks on the road during the pandemic when I was heading back towards Colorado in the spring of 2020. It seemed like the trucks outnumbered the cars.

I got to the Petrified Forest National Park pretty early, which is what I'd planned on doing, so I managed to get some of my earliest pictures before the sun was too high in the sky. Unfortunately, the last time I was there, my pictures came out pretty disappointing because I was taking them at almost noon. With the sun almost straight up in the sky, pictures come out flat-looking without much contrast, and landscape pictures usually look terrible.

So I wandered around the Petrified Forest until early afternoon, enjoying the peace and the quiet and the beautiful landscape. And my joy was increased by the fact that I only saw 6 or 8 people the whole time I was in the park, so I could see everything I wanted to see without people and cars in the way.

A couple of miles from the park exit is a big gift shop, Museum, tourist trap complex where they have free boondocking, so I pulled in there next to a picnic table, cranked up the top of the bronco, and settled in for the night.

                                                                        Theboondork

The Painted Desert Inn. Built in 1920 as basically a tourist trap on homesteaded land, and sold to the  Petrified Forest National Monument in the nineteen thirties, where the boys of the CCC's "Civilian Conservation Corps"  rebuilt the building into what it looks like today.

Part of the painted Desert, and the view you get from the hotel.

This old car sits beside the road in the park and since the famous route 66 went through here the car has been left as a memory to all the cars and people that traveled "The Mother Road."

The Petrified Forest National Monument concessioned out the Inn and restaurant to a rather famous concessionaire named Fred Harvey. Harvey was famous for having the food and hotel concessions for various railroads, and notably the young females he hired to work at his concessions were known as Harvey Girls.

I remember visiting the old part of town in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and since Las Vegas was a big railroad town Fred Harvey had an entire hotel built just to house all the Harvey girls that worked at his restaurants in Las Vegas.

The painted Desert is a beautiful place to be, and it is a desert. It was only 60° when I got here, and because of the low humidity I was perfectly comfortable walking around in a T-shirt.