Maia's 10th Birthday Trip!
It was FINALLY Maia’s turn for her 10th birthday trip! She’s been sooo excited for months since she started seriously planning the trip. She’s actually known since right after DZs trip where she wanted to go. Billie Zandbergen told her about petrified wood and gave her a piece and she’s been obsessed with going to the Petrified Forest ever since! She never wavered in her plan. 🤩
So today we got up at 4am, flew to Arizona, and drove to the Petrified Forest National Park! I worried it wouldn’t live up to her expectations but it is truly breathtaking, with purple mountains and lots to balance on. It couldn’t have been more perfect a choice for Maia. Even though today was the windiest day the park ranger said she had EVER seen, with Maia and Eric 45-55 mph winds just added to the adventure!!!
Balancing was extra exciting in the crazy wind!
Rainbow Forest and Giants Logs
Purple girl 🥰
Karate Kid 😂
🥰
Recreating his Calvin and Hobbes shirt
Holding on tight so we don’t blow away!
They had a program you could complete to be a junior ranger! Maia earned a badge!
I got to see petroglyphs! I could barely hold on to my camera though so I’ll take whatever pictures I managed and call it good 😂. It was amazing to see!!
The ranger showed us when this area was part of Pangea it was at the equator! Jungle biome
This looked like a petroglyph to me, on the Pokémon map it’s the guardian of the petrified forest. I googled it to find out more and it’s a Mountain Lion petroglyph at Blue Mesa.
Eric pointed out every cactus 😜
Loved the lines in this piece!
Agate Bridge! Maia wanted to cross it so badly!
Nice chair 🤩. All these rocks you could see tree rings as the silica replaced the original tree cells.
Different colors for different mineral compositions! Lots of iron but also manganese for black, quartz for white, copper for blue!
Be inside by 6:30 or a hungry coyote might eat you 😂😂😂
Purple mountains!!! I got her this shirt because purple is her favorite color and I thought it would be fun for the trip, but I didn’t know it would so perfectly match! One area in the Petrified Forest is called Blue Mesa, and when the striations are blue it’s because the iron in them didn’t oxidize like most of the red striped mountains. So we know it formed under water!!! So cool!!! We learned so much from the ranger!
The quartz forest! The white sand here looked like rivers of crystal, so sparkly!
Maia’s budget didn’t leave a lot of room for us to buy stuff on the trip, but I thought we could use a mascot so I got her a new meemeow for the trip! We had a blast on the drive, playing lots of road trip games (mostly the one where you pick a topic and select five things and try to match others choices. So fun)
