Arizona

We have moved on to Arizona.  When we left New Mexico, we rather accidentally ended up boondocking in a Walmart parking lot in Albuquerque.  It was our first time needing to boondock at a Walmart, but it went just fine.  In the morning, we grabbed some fruit, and we saw this as we walked back out to our camper:

Made me quite excited, since Albuquerque is known for hot air balloons, and we saw 4 of them in the parking lot area.  Nice!

We kept driving and made it into Arizona, stopping at an Indian reservation for lunch.  I've been taking pictures of anything that declares itself to be the world's largest - whatever it is - on this trip.  So, here's the world's largest teepee.  I'm not sure it really counts, given that it was made of sheet metal, though.  Ha!

As we continued our drive to the Grand Canyon area, we made a stop where a meteorite had hit the earth, and you could see a giant crater.  Well, we could have seen the giant crater if we'd wanted to pay $90 for our family to climb to the top of a building and look down on the hole for a minute.  When you're trying to explore the whole country, you have to be picky about how you're spending your money.  We turned around from the building and looked up a picture of the crater on the internet while in their parking lot.  It looked nice.

As we were leaving the crater area, we saw people along the road looking through rocks on the ground.  Apparently, broken pieces of meteorite are heavier than similarly sized rocks, and also magnetic.  We got a magnet out of our camper and started testing various rocks for magnetism.  We found these shiny, heavy, and magnetic rocks, and I'm determined that they're meteorite pieces, and that it made this side trip quite worthwhile.  Anyway, our family always enjoys playing with rocks.

The next day was Sunday, and we went to Sedona to climb on the red rocks there.  Our kids were really disappointed we didn't make it to the top of the rocks, but it seemed a little dangerous with young kids and with the fact that we were low on water.  But, we did make it a good portion of the way up Bell Rock, and it was quite a fun adventure!

The next day, we visited the Grand Canyon.  It was fantastic!  A great way to spend our anniversary, and also just fun hiking and showing the kids the vastness of the Grand Canyon.  We all really enjoyed those sights!

part way down the Bright Angel trail into the Canyon

our hiking in the desert water dilemma is now solved

The rest of the week, we're relaxing our sightseeing schedule a bit and spending time at the indoor pool and the playground here.  The campground also does a wild west shootout every morning, so we've been regularly watching that play.

It's been nice to have a week with a little down time.  So, that's our summary of Arizona.  We hope you have a wonderful Easter this weekend!  Christ is risen!!!