Day 2: Albuquerque, NM ---> Flagstaff, AZ

After an exhausting evening we woke up to a very, very frigid Albuquerque. By the way - Kirtland Air Force Inn - top notch accommodations. Besides being the first stop outside Texas, I was excited to stop in Alb and check it out. Chris frequently travels to Kirtland for work (he's there now actually) so it was fun to see where he actually goes :) First order of business, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. Chris has visited this museum for work and wanted to show me some of his work related stuff. The museum was very well put together and considering I don't know much about that slice of history it was very enlightening.

The museum

Periodic table of elements entry way - cool!

Someday, this will be in my driveway.

The road to Flagstaff was long and occasionally snowy. The scenery started getting more and more interesting along the way. Chris and I passed the miles pondering the difference of mesas, plateaus and buttes. Bet you don't remember from high school!

Mesa? Butte? Plateau?? Will we ever know? (yep, I'm funny).

Color! Hills!

Along the way, we drove through some really depressed Native American land. You can tell these tiny towns with little tourist stops were hanging by a thread and the rough economic time has severed that stream of income. Very sad.

Uh oh. White stuff again.

Continental Divide! We seem to see a lot of this on vacation (Multiple sightings on the Glacier/Banff vacation of 2010).

We made it to sunny, beautiful... Arizona?

I was hoping to lay by the pool and soak up some Arizona sun. Next time.

Two most critical things about me on road trips. I like to nap. I'm a map watcher. I watch the roadsigns and stare at my map. No tacky tourist trap will escape me. No little town will go unnoticed. National Parks? Viewpoints? Not going to miss them on my watch. I was thrilled to see we'd be passing right through the Petrified National Forest National Park. One squeal and obsessive pointing at my map and Chris knew his husbandly duties.

We pull off to get to this...

And get this... for reals?

No worries - our daylight was limited and there was this killer tourist trap coming up. Meteor Crater. There had been billboards for hours. A must see. We get off the freeway and drive for miles through cow pastures.

This guy helped us along our way...

On my way to see a meteor crater!

So we roll up to the visitors center. Just on the other side of that building exists a 1 mile wide, 550 ft deep crater created by a rock from space. Cool. Except... the admission to see a hole in the ground was $16. For the two of us... THIRTY. TWO. DOLLARS. Call us cheap, but...uh no. (And it was blowing wind and freezing, surprise) Anyways, we passed on that attraction, I'll leave it to google to show you what we would've seen.

Luckily the view was pretty sweet. Flagstaff was just over those mountains!

We made it to Flagstaff with no further complication. One little nervous moment when the driveway to the hotel was closed (snow, again) but luckily we found the back parking lot. We checked into the hotel in time to watch the sunset over the hills before heading out for pizza and beer at the Beaver Street Brewery in downtown Flagstaff (and a few snowy back roads too icy for the Corolla).

Sunset while we were unloading the car

Beer sampler

Pizza! With blackbeans!

The next two days were tourist days. No driving! We carefully watched the weather to decide if we'd spend our next day in the Grand Canyon or Sedona. A snowy day would put a real damper on this portion of our vacation.