Cottonwood AZ to Gallup NM

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder.....will not quite, but it sounded good. No one wants to hear about 9:00 am starts that begin at 10:30 so I will skip that part. We headed north on 17 towards Flagstaff this morning. Our agenda was...we didn't have one. We wanted to be in New Mexico some time early evening. Our ultimate goal is to be in Albuquerque on Friday afternoon.

Some people warned us about the possibility of snow in Flagstaff and beyond. As we began our accent towards Flagstaff we saw small patches of snow on the ground (off the road thank goodness). We also realized that we were at 6000 feet above sea level. The higher we got, the bigger the patches. No snow on the road.

We headed east on Highway 40 and saw signs for Meteor Crater. Off the main road we went to see if this was another Highway attraction, or for real. Six miles off the road we found a large tourist center with an even larger crater. After paying admission (senior citizen rate) we ventured into the museum, theater, and gift shop. Some time in the pre-historic past a large meteor slammed into the earth. The blast was equivalent to 1000 times the bomb dropped in Japan. It is not the largest meteor to hit the earth, but the hole was 700 feet deep and the circumference is 2 and 1/4 miles around. It was a great geology lesson. It is privately owned by a family who established mining rights in the 1800's. It has also been used by NASA to train the astronauts who went to the moon.

We left the Crater and continued east. We still had not decided where we would stop. I saw a sign that promoted a discussion. It said "Gallup-60 miles". I pondered out loud if anyone could really could do that with out hurting themselves let alone the horse. That discussion then move to a sounds like a good place to stop for a night. We re-calulated the time we needed to get to Albuquerque and realized we could actually stay two nights and still have plenty of time. So we are staying here. We will take several day trips including a NCCST. This reduces the ability to spend anything more than what we have in our pockets. (like that's going to work). We will see how that goes.

New Mexico is just as beautiful as Arizona. We will take more pictures tomorrow.

Note: Just because the truck/weight station says "Trucks, trailers, and tow bars required to go through weight station in New Mexico) apparently does mean that just because we have a tow bar we need to. I didn't think that it was as funny as the guy in the booth did.