Osterhout Visit Nov. 2014 part 1

Stephen and I are grateful that my family was again willing to brave the rigors of air travel with a wheelchair in order to spend a week with us in Albuquerque.  With no direct flights, this is not an easy thing to do!  It took all day Thursday for Mom, Dad, and David to get to Abq, pick up the rental van, and get settled into the hotel.  The adjacent rooms (one accessible) they booked were under construction when they arrived, complicating the check-in process, and making the hotel stay more difficult.  Systems for transferring David in the hotel room and in and out of the van needed to be worked out, and I'd say they pretty much had everything working smoothly by the time they went home!  We certainly appreciate the effort that is required to come visit us.  It is not a small thing.

Stephen and I had to work on Friday.  The O's visited Old Town, where they did some shopping, and then met me at school for a tour before coming to my house for dinner.  Mom and Dad went for a short walk in the open space and Mom and I went for a walk in the neighborhood to look at all the interesting houses and landscapes.

My room at school.

My school.

My house.

The next day we met at the hotel and headed West on I-40 to visit the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest in Arizona.  Dad had read an article in the Albany Times Union about the interesting architecture of the Painted Desert Inn, and when he did some additional research, decided it would make a good day trip.  He was right!  We started at the Visitor's Center where we had lunch. 

 Then we stopped at an overlook to admire the Painted Desert.

These formations are called the Teepees.

David was amused to find this fire hydrant in the middle of the desert.

The Painted Desert Inn was really cool, and the volunteer park ranger entertained us with stories of the original inn and the WPA restoration.

Our next stop was the Petrified Forest.  During the Late Triassic, downed trees accumulating in river channels in what became the park were buried periodically by sediment containing volcanic ash. Groundwater dissolved silica (silicon dioxide) from the ash and carried it into the logs, where it formed quartz crystals that gradually replaced the organic matter. Traces of iron oxide and other substances combined with the silica to create varied colors in the petrified wood.
The Petrified Forest looks like a Star Trek set -- my idea of a distant, marginally inhabitable planet.

On the way home, we had dinner at the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, NM.  We discovered it on the way home from the Grand Canyon with Liz, and had so much fun that we had to experience it again!