Where is the petrified forest?

From Santa Fe we head to Albuquerque. Our home for the night is the parking of a Casino, which we decide to give some gambling custom. But Tyler is considered to young to play the slot machines and we were politely told to come back in 15 years if we want to gamble jointly with our son. Francis gets into a friendly argument with the locals, on what the longest cable car is in the world: the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix or Sandia Peak in Albuquerque (to our surprise the correct answer is the latter) .

In the morning we head West trough the prairies and land of native Indians. The next landmarks on our way are the "Painted Desert" and the "Petrified Forest". At the entrance of the national park we have to fill in a form declaring that we don't have any stones in our camper and that we have not entered the park to rob the country's national heritage. It is not easy to find the petrified trees and with help of binoculars and good eye sight we are able to make them out in the distance. You can imagine our surprise at seeing that we can buy a manifold of petrified wood at the park's exit and even much more in the local town. We would even go that far to claim that there is more petrified wood for sale in a 10 mile perimeter of the park than to see in the park itself. So we would not really have been robbing national heritage, just the local's livelihood....

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