Final Blog
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We stayed at the Williams, Arizona, KOA Kampground for three nights. It was great to have a few days to rest up, do a little housecleaning and take a break from the constant riding. On Sunday we attended the First Baptist Church of Williams. Everyone was friendly and made us feel right at home. There were a number of visitors from various states and several locals told us that they were preparing to leave for Phoenix for the winter. Similar to our local snowbirds, they go south for the winter and come back to Williams for the summer. The weather is warm, but there is a breeze most of the time and no humidity, so the heat isn’t stifling. Thomas had told us that the water table in the area is so far down that it’s cheaper to have water hauled in by truck than to have a well drilled. Some places have water delivered by tank trucks on a regular schedule, others go and pick it up in their own tanks.
The picture of the Kaibab trail shows the trail that Clara and I rode down on muleback in 1967. We rode to the point at the edge of the cliff, then turned back and had lunch in the trees in the center of the picture. Then we plodded back up to the rim.
Monday morning we headed east (on I-40, not I-20 as I wrote in the last blog), not letting any grass grow under the truck. We had one more stop on our schedule: The Petrified Forest and Painted Desert. They reminded us of the badlands of South Dakota, except for the petrified wood lying in huge logs, some broken into many pieces, some sticking out of the sand, some in small pieces. Our first stop was on the “Long Logs Trail” near the visitor center at the Petrified Forest. We got there right after a ranger had started leading a group on the trail. He told how the logs were buried in water that was laden with silica, which replaced the tissue in the logs, turning them to stone.
The petrified logs are spread over a large area and testify to a catastrophe that occurred in the past. The ranger showed us a petrified seashell that was found by a young girl on the Long Logs Trail some years ago. There are many marine fossils in the park, and while it is often stated that the area at some time in the past was a “shallow sea,” I think perhaps there is just as good a possibility that the shells and other marine fossils were floated in during a huge flood “of biblical proportions.”
The Painted Desert reminded us of the landscape of the Badlands we had seen in South Dakota. The ranger joked that they hadn’t retouched the paint in quite awhile, but the colors were holding up well. No joke. There are scientific explanations of why the various layers are colored as they are, but that doesn’t mean a thing when you stand and watch them blend, contrast, weave and change. We drove through late in the day and every mile and shift of shadow changed the colors of the landscape. It makes you marvel at the eye’s ability to see color and caused us to marvel at another of God’s blessings, that of sight. Check out the various chemical reactions that have to take place in the eye, literally in nanoseconds, and tell yourself that this ability to see at all, let alone subtle color shifts, is a result of accidental random mutations. Michael Behe has a great chapter on this in Darwin’s Black Box.
We spent a night in Albuquerque, and saw the gradual shift in the landscape from desert grays, beiges and sage greens to the yellow grasslands of the Texas panhandle and the rolling hills of Oklahoma. We stopped in Shamrock, Texas, where my friends and I had spent the night over forty years ago. There were reminders all along the way of the old Route 66 that has now been retired. The restroom at the rest stop had a tile mural of scenes from Route 66.
The green of roadside crops in Arkansas, along with the change to piney woods that more closely resembled those of home—no more lodgepole pines–made us realize our trip was fast coming to an end. We zipped around Memphis (I couldn’t even talk Gary into stopping at Graceland, just for old times’ sake), and headed for Knoxville, where we spent the night at Soaring Eagle Campground. (I’ve included a picture of their exit sign.) It was warm in the day time, but cooled off again in the evening since we were back in mountains. It was great to be back in our familiar old Smokies. The vistas might not be as grand, glacier-ridden or high-peaked as the ones we’d seen in the west, but they were familiar and looked like “home.”
On Friday we wound our way down I-40 to Asheville and hopped on I-26 for the last leg of our trip. Finally about 7:00 p.m. on Friday, September 5, 2009, we drove up to our house in Tabor City. Maggie gave a whistle, that let us know she was glad to be back too. The cats, Killer and Boudreau, came running out for some ear scratching and we collapsed on sofas, sorry our adventure was over, but glad to be home.
