Archive | July, 2012

Petrified Forest National Park

Go for the Fossils. Stay for the Scenery.

Petrified Forest National Park

Of all the places we’ve visited in our more than two years of continuous travel, Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park has to be the most under-sold. We arrived there expecting to see 225 million year old wood. What we found were some of the most magnificent badland vistas of our trip.

That’s not to say Petrified Forest doesn’t live up to its namesake, too. It does. The place is lousy with fossilized trees. And unlike other fossils, these aren’t impressions of once living creatures in stone. These once living organisms are stone.

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Photo of the Day: Sunrise Over Theodore Roosevelt NP

Sunrise Over Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Sunrise Over Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota

Mission San Xavier del Bac

Mission San Xavier del Bac

We rounded a corner and, at first, the gleaming white building looked to us like the Taj Mahal. An instant later we recognized the Moorish-inspired structure looming over a sea of green as Mission San Xavier del Bac.

A short drive from downtown Tucson, Arizona, San Xavier stands as one of the most impressive missions we’ve visited in our tour of the Southwest. Its seemingly spotless white façade is a distinct contrast to the more ancient look of the San Antonio Missions. And its ornate architecture sets it apart from the simpler structures we found on El Paso’s Mission Trail.

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