By 8.00 AM we arrive at the first stage of our trip today: Petrified Forest National Park, AZ. This park is not well-known by the average European America traveler and we only learned about this park by means of our travel guide. It is a beautiful day with sunshine and temperatures in the mid 70s, perfect weather for exploring a national park. We enter the park through the north gate and start driving along a paved trail towards the south gate. Quickly after heading out from the north entrance we reach the Painted Desert, which offers several spectacular viewpoints along the way. When a European thinks of deserts he/she usually cannot help but imagine vast wastelands that might be quite boring, sand everywhere, pretty much like the Sahara. But the scenery is everything else but monotonous: Our eyes are pampered with beautiful views over colorful rocks that come in various shapes. Inbetween the fascinating landscape one can find some desert vegetation and spot some animals (mice, rabbits, foxes, birds), and we are puzzled about how it is possible to make a living in such conditions. Signs with notes along a short hiking trail shed some light on the secrets of the desert inhabitants on adaptation to the hostile circumstances of their lives. Fortunately, the park is still quite empty at this time of day, a fact that gives us the opportunity of enjoying the majesty of nature in perfect tranquility. We could spend hours and hours admiring the scenery, but we have a lot of miles to go today and so we have to keep going. While approaching the south entrance we explore some rock paintings from native Americans that occupied this land centuries ago and discover more and more pieces of the object that the park is named after: petrified wood. This is wood that got mineralized over many, many years, embedding fossils and turning into beautifully shimmering stones. Time flies by and we soon have to leave the park to head to the next National Park on our list: The Grand Canyon.
Much in contrast to Petrified Forest National Park the Grand Canyon is one of the main destinations of European tourists that are visiting the western part of the United States. And sure enough, the number of visitors here is much higher than this morning in Petrified Forest. It is already quite late when we reach the East gate of the Grand Canyon and we have about 1 to 1.5 hours till sunset. At the first viewpoint we run into a lot of fellow tourists and notice that a good part of them is German. After stopping at several viewpoints and taking in the spectacular sights and atmosphere we find ourselves a nice spot to await the sunset. The play of light in the canyons is awesome to watch and spreads a feeling of peace and silence despite the crowd of people around us. After getting a glimpse of the beauty and impressive dimensions of this national park we hit the road again and drive for some more hours. Originally, we intended to reach Barstow, CA by night to look for a motel but sleepiness is overwhelming us as we reach Needles, CA, and we spontaneously decide to change plans and spend the night here.
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