Saturday, April 7, 2012

Spring Break Road Trip, Day 5

Exit 233, I-40 Eastbound is where you need to turn right to get to the Meteor Crater road, and drive for about 6 miles where you get close to the museum and find out that you need to pay $16 per adult in order to touch the biggest piece of the crater and have a little tour around the crater's edge. We are always rich so we just happily paid it and got in. There comes the lucky charm again and best tour guide becomes ours. let me introduce one of the coolest persons I've ever met: Eduardo. An aged man with a sun burnt skin, wearing a baseball cap and with a super humorous temper. He guided us through the narrow trail they had provided for the tourists along the ridge of the crater and stopped a few times to inform us about the geological happened after the big mass hit the earth and layers of the earth's crust went up and down and they replaced each other, talking about the vegetation, and the stones, and the constituents of the meteor. That was where we were acquainted with the Mormon Tea, Juniper, Purple Sage. specifically, I always thought that these purple sages were lavender, but obviously I was wrong!! the other thing is the Mormon Tea which as Eduardo said is about 10 times stronger than Coffee and the Mormons didn't know about it but were using it because in their religion or tradition or whatever, they can't drink tea or coffee because they contain caffeine!! Weird! any way, we picked some Mormon Tea plant from the next destination in the area, however it was illegal but who cares! we wanna taste it lol!
here is a picture of the Crater.
Just to give you an idea of how big this hole is, suppose 22 football fields can be fit in the crater. And the meteor was about say one football field. You know what I have not said about this place is a story about a boy from Missouri and a bunny from Pennsylvania! while the three of us were listening to the funny Eduardo, someone was missing: Nima, right next to the girl from Pennsylvania, not listening to a word about the crater, all focused on her and what best pick-up line to use. Anyhow, happened for the barbie to start the conversation and say i don't know whatever, and we never saw Nima with us again during that little stroll. we were taking pictures and laugh and so on, while someone was very happy getting more familiar with a sweet blond, and when we came back to the trail head, Nima introduced her, Megan, to the crew and vice versa and mentioned that she's heading toward a place name Petrified Forest which was not in our plan at all, but in our path, and said can we join her blah blah ... well of course we can dear Nima, let's go, what more exciting than seeing a petrified forest!! God knows what that is. I-40 east, drive for about 60 miles and take a right and drive some more till you get to a place where all the branches of trees fallen on the desert land, just stoned, all petrified!! wel in the park catalog it explains why all that is petrified and what's going on in between the grows cells during the million years and all that and I am not gonna talk about it here, but over all a very nice place with a totally new experience about nature stuff! never had heard about such a thing before. Thanks to Megan, though we were going to miss the ABQ downtown!! here is a picture of the stoned forest but it doesn't have the stoned tree trunks, search for it on Google hahaah!!!

Time to say goodbye for now Mister Nima, exchange the phone numbers and all the farewell compliments and let's go, so we can get to the hotel before midnight at least. I drove the rest of it and oh Gosh, it was an awesome drive... all two lane rural US highways and night time, with a cool owl right next to me who would hoot with me till we reach the hotel. The cityscape of Albuquerque was beautiful at night, everyone, wake up enjoy this and we're at the hotel. everything was perfect. Finally these two people had a shower and got clean, thanks to them. and we slept like four elephants in one room. Sweet dreams till the great adventure of another national monument in New Mexico...

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