Friday, May 4, 2012

Yesterday was our most interesting day so far. We stopped at Richardson's Trading Post in Gallup, New Mexico. This was the one good find on the old Route 66. The store has been there for 100 years and it is stuffed from floor to ceiling with authentic Native American items. Some are brand new and others are probably antique. The store is also a pawn shop so I'm sure that is one way they get such neat items.

. Soon after leaving Gallup, we entered Arizona. Apparently you are gradually going up across Arizona and periodically theybpost a sign giving the elevation. By the time we reached Flagstaff, we were at approximately 6,000 feet. In Flagstaff we turned north towards the Grand Canyon. We passed Mt Humphreys which is the highest peak in AZ at over 12,000 feet. The highest elevation sign we saw on the road was about 8,500 feet. We were very fortunate to be able to get a room right in the Grand Canyon National Park and we were within walking distance of the rim of the canyon. WOW!! What an amazing site the canyon is!! It's hard to capture the vastness and enormous size of the canyon in pictures. The same holds true for the whole area of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

This morning we left Grand Canyon and headed north towards Zion National Park. The scenery on our route was totally spectacular!! We traveled on route 89 which passes right through the largest Navajo Indian Reservation in the country. There were lots of little shacks along the road where some of the Native Americans were selling their hand crafted items. We stopped to check a couplenout.

Tonight we are staying at the Zion Ponderosa Resort which is just a few miles from the entrance to Zion National Park. We will stay here for a couple days and go into Zion tomorrow. We lost an hour today.