This is the fourth in a series of posts about visiting 12 national parks in Utah and Arizona over 9 days.

Our original plans called for a straight haul from Kayenta to the Grand Canyon, a 3-hour drive with nothing to see along the way. I pulled out the AAA maps and TourBook® guides, realizing we could add two national parks to our tally, plus an attraction I’d always wanted to see: Meteor Crater (from the movie “Starman”). The only hitch: adding 4 more hours to our drive time. And there’d be no speeding—the AAA TripTik warned that “traffic laws are being enforced to an unusually strict degree” in Arizona.

We woke up at dark-thirty and set off for our first stop: Canyon de Chelly National Monument. In a nutshell, this collection of Puebloan ruins requires (and deserves) a full day. Scenic drives run along both rims of the canyon, and a 2.5-mile trail leads to the bottom. We were able to see the White House ruins from the overlook, and then it was time to move on.

Two hours later, we reached Petrified Forest National Park. In the third grade, my neighbor brought home a shiny rock from his summer vacation, and I’ve wanted to visit this place every since. How amazing to see quartz logs scattered across the sand like driftwood, but these prehistoric artifacts are only part of the attraction. The 220,000-acre park also protects a southwestern version of the badlands, along with 800-year-old Pueblo ruins. We took a short walk to see the petroglyphs at Puerco Pueblo, a community of 100 rooms around a central plaza.

Following the 28-mile scenic drive from one end of the park to the other, we stopped at the Rainbow Forest Museum and Giant Logs Trail near the southern entrance. The massive “Old Faithful” is nearly 10 feet in diameter; the “Giant” is 60 feet long. Park visitors are forbidden from picking up petrified wood from the ground (and the ranger at the gate will make you swear), but commercial samples are available for sale at local gift shops.

Leaving the park, we continued west on I-40. We try to avoid interstates as much as possible on road trips (favorite setting on the Magellan GPS: “least use of freeways”), and we looked for excuses to pull off. We took a quick detour into Holbrook, where Historic Route 66 passes the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel. We lost more time in Joseph City at the “world famous” Jack Rabbit Trading Post. Generations of kids have perched on the giant saddle-wearing hare in the parking lot, but the place looked almost abandoned, so we didn’t stop.

It was late afternoon, and we missed the statue of the young man “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.” (Question: Whose version of the song was better: the Eagles or Jackson Browne?) Despite the hour, the parking lot at Meteor Crater was busy. We flinched at the $15 admission price, but figured we were there, so what the heck. Then we asked for the time and realized we’d gained an hour. (Don’t ask me to explain Arizona’s convoluted DST rules.)

Unfortunately, we forgot to check the movie schedule, so we missed the highlight of the visitor center, but the rest of the exhibits were fascinating. The crater itself is…big. It’s so big you can’t really gauge its size, even with the tiny, life-size cutout of an astronaut at the bottom. (NASA used the crater for lunar training.) We would have liked to take a guided rim tour, but again, no time.

And then we hoofed it to the Grand Canyon, driving north on US 89 from Flagstaff. The sun was setting as we turned onto scenic SR 64, which runs along the south rim. We shivered in the wind at the Desert View overlook and ran to buy hot chocolate, but the snack shop was just closing.

Photographers lined the railings at Moran Point, trying to capture the perfect twilight shot. (Mine came out too dark.) We reached Grand Canyon Village around nine o’clock. After a week on the open road, with most of the parks to ourselves, we were shocked by the theme-park traffic—all the lots were full. The lobby of Bright Angel Lodge was packed with kids on laptops, taking advantage of free WiFi. We found our little red cabin (quaint, complete with mini-fridge) and headed back to the lodge for a late dinner.

Having dealt with Xanterra restaurants at other national parks, we knew better than to expect haute cuisine, or fast seating without a reservation. We waited for about an hour in the lodge bar, listening to the band play “Margaritaville.” I was definitely feeling old—the bar was so small, and the music so loud, we couldn’t hear each other talk. Let’s just say dinner wasn’t worth the wait. Around three a.m., a party checked into the cabin next door, but we were already awake—there were ants in the bed. Happy birthday!    Next: More Grand Canyon.