We're in Flagstaff, Arizona this morning and heading to Sedona later. We had a lovely, relaxing weekend in Albuquerque with a fun side trip to Santa Fe. Yesterday we visited the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, and planned to stay somewhere nearby for the night. We soon discovered the closest towns are all casualties of the demise of Route 66, and chose to drive through to Flagstaff.

For nearly a week we've been following the ruins of Route 66 along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and now Arizona. In some places there are no visual cues that a community once thrived along a thoroughfare, other places are dotted with filling stations long closed, then there are sections still filled with shops and activity.

Route 66 is a great example of change - even during its heyday engineers constantly improved it as they developed technology to make the routes between cities more direct. As interstates were built, they first replaced rural sections of Route 66, gradually bypassing more and more cities. Businesses feared losing business once the bypasses were constructed, and rightly so. Just like in the movie Cars, communities did suffer, although there are efforts at conservation.

The Painted Desert National Park officially preserves a section of Route 66 within its boundaries, but there is not even a hint of where the road originally passed. I really enjoyed the 26-mile drive through the park and petrified forest, the sights were in the top few of my life so far (with Alaska still maintaining a significant lead for first place). There were scattered showers and even some hail when we drove through, which made the colors on the rocks more vibrant. The cloud formations casting shadows and splashing light on the vista made for some beautiful photographs even though we were just using our camera phones. Here is a shot of our tour bus in the park.