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I spent the morning riding out to Meteor Crater and back. Of all of the things on my possible to-do list for this trip, none of them attracted as much controversy as Meteor Crater. About half of the people who mentioned it thought it was a complete waste of time, and the other half thought it was really cool. I wonder if there's a correlation between thinking it was cool and going to the museum attached to it. The crater really is just a hole in the ground (I realized today that one of the reasons that I'm never very enlightened by the use of football fields to measure things, is that I think I've never been to a live football game), but there are some interesting exhibits at the museum, and it's pretty well designed for interactivity ("Here's a chunk of meteorite and a chunk of "Earth Rock", try lifting each one to understand how dense this meteor was"). There's also an impact simulator. I managed to completely destroy the Earth with my first try.
Afterwards, I headed back through Holbrook to the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Park. I'm getting a bit jaded about badlands and the red rock of the southwest, because most of the colors in the north section of the park seemed dull and uninspiring in the mid-day light. The part of the park south of I-40 had some more interesting colors, particularly blues and purples.
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