In our quest to get out of the smoke plume from the Northwestern fires, we traveled south before going east. On the second afternoon we decided to stop at Las Vegas, which Paula had never seen. We drove thru the Strip with its tall buildings, animated advertisements, and fancy casinos and got a room at the Paris Hotel. The rooms were amazingly inexpensive-the idea being you should spend more money gambling than on lodging.
At night we walked some of the Strip and got to see fountain displays, all the decorative lights, and many people-some quite unusual in appearance. Tommy was briefly waylaid by a “SWAT officer”, but managed to extract himself by tipping her, which apparently is customary in Las Vegas. We did a little gambling in the casino. Tommy lost $40 and Paula won $5.
Next morning, we turned east and toured the Petrified Forest National Park. Unbelievably ancient trees fell after seismic activity and lay in pools of water saturated with minerals, primarily silica. Eventually, the organic material in the wood was replaced by these minerals, and the structure of the trees transformed into stony representations of the original fallen logs. This left them quite brittle and prone to cracking like a dropped stick of chalk. Many display beautiful jewel-like colors. Traveling thru the area we also got to see all the colors and the arid beauty of the Painted Desert (featured picture on this post).
As we left Arizona and New Mexico and entered Oklahoma, we began to see much more familiar surroundings: grass, rolling pastures, trees, and cows. What a big change! In Oklahoma, we overnighted near a place called “Dead Woman’s Crossing”. That name comes from an unsolved murder in 1905 which you can read about here –Dead Women Crossing, Oklahoma – Wikipedia.
As always, click on any of these pictures to see a larger version.
