Joe, Bryn-dog and I decided to drive to California from Michigan, beginning April 6 and lasting nearly 3 weeks, to see our extended family. We would also inspect anything fascinating along the way.
Here’s part 2 of our epic journey.
We spent two days exploring the arty sections of Santa Fe, moving into and out of countless small stucco homes that had been converted to galleries. Each featured some pretty spectacular paintings and sculptures, traditional and modern. One gallery displayed glorious New Mexican sunsets the artist saw every evening from his deck. Typical price: $15,000 for a small canvas. We admired, then left with brochures that sometimes showed the paintings we’d liked. Bryn stayed in our van, tucked under a huge tree. (Parking in this city is very tricky, indeed. Finding a space within walking distance is always challenging. One should be a fit walker.)
On the road again we pointed toward Joshua Tree National Park, just inside the California border, another decent day’s drive.
New Mexico’s asphalt freeway (US Highway 66/ I-40) is smooth as velvet: this undulating black ribbon anchors the ever-changing painting that is the huge Mojave Desert. Over there the sky was cerulean blue with wispy mare’s tails clouds: then, just a bit further right, we watched gigantic circular rain-loaded black clouds blanket a mountaintop, and then splash God-sized buckets of water over its selection, while neighboring behemoths, (their eons-old pyramidal cone shapes betraying their volcanic origins) served as stunning black backdrops. One very tall mountain monster boasted a snow-white top, befitting its great height and age. We found ourselves driving under a raincloud’s outer edge: pelting water periodically scrubbed our desert-dusty van clean; the windscreen wipers were busy. These incredible weather contrasts were a visual miracle.
No wonder painters move here!
An aside: New Mexico’s safety signs read: Buckle Up: It’s Our Law. The ‘our’ is friendlier, more- personal, and pleased me in some indefinable way.
The red-orange earth is home to stubbornly green desert creosote shrubs that pepper the undulating, parched ground for as far as the eye can see. We stopped once so I could walk to the edge of the road to confirm that the parched soil was barely a quarter inch thick. Underneath? Sandstone, forever deep.
How can anything survive, and even thrive, here? 
Once in a while a scoured shack’s skeletal remains would jut out, interrupting the desert’s smoother contours. The merciless Mojave is steadily stripping each one of color; wind is prying off and scattering the framework. Eventually everything will be reabsorbed completely.
Somewhere along the iconic Route 66 we stopped for lunch in a dusty, exhausted little town whose name escapes me. Its one ‘main’ street boasted ‘The Road Kill Café,’ announced by a sand and sun-scoured, tipped-to-the-side sign that was probably helping to hold up the ancient building.
Perfect! 
We entered, and found cheerful staff who delivered good food in a clean interior crammed with memorabilia. We bought a mug depicting a motorcycle roaring down Route 66. Cool!
Bewhiskered old motorcycle geezers patted our ’71 Honda motorcycle and told stories of their machines way back when. Maybe, they commented wistfully, our bike’s former owner rode it through here once upon a time, long, long ago...
It, and we, slid seamlessly into the atmosphere of this tiny tumbledown town which was trying to survive by stopping time....
An hour later we hit the road again, rolling through more empty desert magnificence extending for hundreds more miles. Occasionally, distantly, two-mile-long, three-engine cargo trains, small as toys, moved silently through the huge canvas, reminding me of the live paintings at Harry Potter’s school, Hogwarts. Giant color-bleached steel boxes rode atop hundreds of flat cars.
Sometimes a train simply sat dead still, its containers glinting in the sun. I had the sense that one had been motionless for a good while. Maybe days. Our binoculars could find no human tending it.
A few semi-trucks passed us, pushing strong airwaves our way. Joe steadied our van until the wave sorted itself. Rain fell, paused, fell again, while the sun blazed just over there.
We stared and stared at the astounding, ever-changing panorama for hours and hours.
We entered Arizona quietly, its border barely announced.
After a long time I started to doze off, when suddenly a dusty highway sign caught my eye:
Meteor Crater 16 miles
Heavens! This marvel had to be the one I first saw in National Geographic 50 years ago. I was hugely impacted by the magazine’s fold-out pictures of the massive hole it left.
“Joe, the world’s biggest intact meteor crater is close; Lets turn!” We made a left and drove 6-7 miles down a dusty road to a smallish paved parking lot. Only the enormous rim was visible from where we’d stopped. As the crater is privately owned, a fee of $19.00/person was charged inside the large, attractive building, which included a very informative exhibit of the phenomenon, plus a movie.
“Never mind that stuff,” I said as we showed our tickets. “This place shuts down in 50 minutes, Joe, at 5 p.m.; Hurry! If we have time after we see the crater we can watch the film and inspect the gift shop then.”
We climbed three stories quickly, went outside, shivering in the cold wind, turned at a curve- and-
There. It. Was.
The sight stopped me cold. The sun was at four o’clock; the crater was immense. Gigantic. 
Some fascinating facts:
-It’s a mile and a half wide, 550 feet deep- after 50,000 years of erosion.
-Right now it could hold 22 giant football stadiums filled with 2 million people.
-A life-sized astronaut cutout in full white space suit has been placed at the bottom; a telescope invites a look. Even with magnification, the figure is super-teeny. (By the way, astronauts trained inside the crater in the ‘60s.)
-Two American Airline pilots rented a Cessna 150 (a small, two-seater plane exactly like the one I trained in) in Flagstaff, in the summer of 1964, to fly to Los Angeles. On the way they flew over the crater, but lost altitude in the hot, thin summer air. (The crater is over 5,000 feet above sea level.) The experienced jet pilot tried to circle inside it to build up air speed, but couldn’t attain the lift necessary to climb out. They crashed: both were seriously injured. The passenger pilot, his back broken, still managed to pull the ‘captain’ out of the ruined, vigorously burning plane, saving his life. Both survived. The pilot recovered to fly for the airlines again, and died in 2003. The passenger pilot is still alive.
One can still see the burnt-out fuselage with the binoculars provided.
For archeologists and rock hounds like me, this place is not to be missed. We did tear ourselves away from the crater in time to see the excellent eight-minute movie showing the impact.
The fossils for sale in the gift shop were the best I’ve ever seen. Fish, perhaps 60,000,000 years old, were perfectly preserved in sandstone. Three or four curled shells that once housed sea creatures half as large as I, could be touched. They were incredibly heavy. Huge trilobites (creatures similar to our garden pillbugs, but massive) were likewise trapped forever in sandstone, so perfectly detailed that we gasped. One has to be wealthy to buy these stunning fossils: prices were in the many thousands. But Oh! They were so beautiful! We were gobsmacked. Blown away. Awed into quiet for a long time as we drove away toward the California border.
Bryn slept in the van’s back seat, oblivious to the alien fingerprint that a 150 foot long space rock left when it slammed into an immovable object at over 28,000 mph, creating massive destruction the equivalent of a ten-megaton bomb.
It’s the only intact crater left in the world.