Journey vs. Destination

We went to the Petrified Forest National Park today.

I was driving this morning (or there would have been a post posted about Meteor Crater while we were in the car instead of much later). Anyway, I didn’t get a snack when I should have and ended up way too hungry. I’d hiked around Flagstaff’s outskirts and Meteor Crater on a breakfast of coffee and a protein bar.

So, I had gotten well into the low blood sugar mode that includes tired headaches, finding concentration difficult (kind of important when going that fast). I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see something else new. But we had a picnic lunch and needed a place to eat it.

When we finally got to the exit for the Petrified Forest, we got out at the visitor center with our picnic (grocery store bagels, cheese, hummus and a half pound of fresh cut fruit). I gobbled it down and felt much better, like we should go on and see whatever it is they made a national park around before heading off to Albuquerque.

OMG, I think I may be the first person to have discovered this incredibly beautiful place. (Yeah, the roads and paved paths managed to leave me that illusion.) I mean, have you seen the Painted Desert? It was incredible. As with Meteor Crater, no picture does it justice. It was huge. More than, that though, the Painted Desert was incredibly, awesomely beautiful.

I look at that picture and it is missing all the colors, the incredible striations and hills of individual colors. The sky was huge, like the normal California sky is just a little bitty part of the sky here. I don’t have the words and I don’t think the pictures are enough but they are better than the words so I’ll choose only a few more.

These pictures are just reminders to me, like a short list jotted down means a lot more to the person who wrote the list than to someone who comes across it later. Imagine that level of difference between these pictures and the real thing. Then multiply by ten.

It just went on and on. We went to several vista points and each one was majestic and breathtaking.

But this national park is not a mesmerizingly beautiful one-trick pony. It also has evidence of indigenous people, including the ruins of a pueblo city and Newspaper Rock,  a wall of petroglyphs. Further on, there are huge logs of petrified wood, each one a giant jewel from eons ago. I don’t mean little chips of wood-rocks. These were giant trees make into giant geode colored rocks.

However, we didn’t see those. We got to the end of the Painted Desert and didn’t go on. Part of the reason was because C was tired (didn’t sleep well last night) and we were both pretty hot. But that wasn’t really it…

I couldn’t take in anymore. The painted desert was so mindblowingly beautiful that I was a little afraid to go on. What could be a second act to that? Why dilute the beauty?

And, part of me wondered, what if it got better? My brain was full of the box of paints splattered across the desert. If it got better, it (my brain) was just going to go kablooey.

I turned that into a joke but I meant it, I really didn’t want to go on because I wanted to let my mind settle, to soak up what I had and to fix the picture in my head that my camera just can’t capture.