Caprock Canyons State Park, Painted Desert and Petrified Forest N.P.

When Fred mentioned we should spend Thanksgiving with our niece and her husband in Tempe, Arizona it sounded great but sometimes his ideas sound great but turn out to be horribly ill-conceived because they can't usually be pulled off without a good deal of, often life-threatening, discomfort on my part.  At this point in the game, it's a bit late to complain about how we get from point A to point B, so that's how it has come to pass that instead of just driving to Tempe and relaxing and having a leisurely visit with some shopping and eating thrown, in we are spending two weeks driving thousands of miles through four states dodging tornadoes, high winds, snow and freezing temperatures.

Our first stop, Caprock Canyons State Park.

Caprock Canyons is way out near the thriving town of Quiteque, pronounced Kitty Qway obviously.  It's mostly flat, arid and fairly treeless basically your typical high plains landscape of the Llano Estacado but out here it's topped off with a nice caprock escarpment of limestone.  Not that this isn't an interesting place to stop but it isn't really near anything and, while the views are nice, they don't really have a wow factor either.

So, you may ask, why is this a State Park?  Well, because it's also the home to Texas' official state bison herd.  Did you know they aren't really buffalo?  Buffalo are found in Asia and Africa, bison in North America.  You're welcome.

They wander through your campground leaving little presents for you to discover when you step out of your trailer.  If you get too close to them (Fred) they will raise their tails high in the form of a question mark, they are trying to show they are very irritated.  That's where the term "high-tail it" comes from.  If you see the tail raised high, high-tail it outta there.

We took several short hikes but the winds were starting to kick up and the temperatures were getting colder so we gave up and stopped by the visitor center to see what was up with the forecast.  The ranger mentioned nonchalantly that we might be in for hail, high winds and tornadoes.  No worry though, if a tornado is imminent just head for the restrooms.  Oh, okay.

As we drove back to our campsite, we noticed a sign on the restroom doors, Closed For Repair.

And here it comes

You could literally watch this storm roll in across the plains and across our computer screen.  It was shortly after this that we abandoned all hope of a cookout and closed the doors on our little survival pod.  I was watching the radar closely refreshing the screen every few minutes while Fred broke out his own version of refreshments and opened a bottle of wine.  It started raining and the little Bambi was arockin' but after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine we called it a night and figured we'd just ride it out.  At some point, a camper came by yelling that winds were forecast at 70 mph and she was taking cover in the restrooms.  Hmmm.

Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park

We awoke the next morning to much colder temps and as we headed out to Holbrook, the little town near the Petrified Forest, there was still quite a bit of snow covering the fields.  We had stayed awake long enough to see the storm split right in half and we dodged all of it except for the rain but you could definitely see how bad it was as we drove down the highway.

We have been to this park before, many years ago on our way to California but we had no time to appreciate it so even though I counted it on our master list of all National Parks visited, it was kinda cheating 'cuz we really only drove the main loop.

 But what a drive, the colors are amazing if you hit it at the right time of day.

Some badass badlands

No shortage of petroglyphs either, they are all over the place.  These were two of my favorites.

Based on the literature, this is either an ibis with a frog or the bird spirit come to teach bad children a lesson.  Guess which story I liked best.

To assist with field cultivation, the ancient Anazasi used rotary blades on their cats

Attempted Murder (that's a bird joke)

I keep telling Fred we need a new car, we found this nice Studebaker along the old Route 66 road which runs through the park

If you look closely you'll see one of the petrified logs rolled off the top of the cliff and smashed below.  There are plenty of stories like this in the park, perched logs rolling downhill, balanced rock no longer balancing, it's probably either climate change or Obama.

Some of the logs are huge and the bark looks like it was preserved perfectly from when the dinosaurs first pushed it over

I hope ya'll appreciate the trouble I go to to obtain accurate photos demonstrating proper perspective because if you look very closely you'll see my phone fell out of my pocket and I cracked the screen

Visiting a place like this is kind of a torture for me because I like to bring home rocks from our travels and they have really, really nice rocks here.

I mean, look at those colors and they come in all sizes including small ones with glittery quartz crystals that would fit right in your pocket.  But taking anything from a National Park will send you to some layer of hell as well it should, and here you get the added bonus of being cursed with bad luck.  The Park headquarters has several letters where, over the years, people have felt especially cursed because they stole a rock and then bad things happened to them so they send the rock back in hopes of making the bad juju go away.  This one was my favorite:

Can't believe he's willing to risk blisters and a breakup

No worries though because this is America where you can purchase anything your little heart desires including literally tons of petrified wood right outside the park boundary where many enterprising residents have acquired the mineral rights to their private land.  Which is what we did, so now I had a good size chunk of petrified log free of any residual bad juju.