Petrified Forest and Figs

Occasionally we stopped to see something interesting during our trip west in 1952. I remember the Petrified Forest best.

Historic Route 66 passed right through what was then a National Monument, one of Teddy Roosevelt's gifts to our nation. I was fascinated with those old quartz tree trunks. I had never seen anything like them and, like much of the west, I was learning something new everywhere I looked. We stayed long enough for Len and me to get a good look, then we drove on.

We stopped for a few days in Pasadena. Again, I had never seen anything like that place. There were palm trees in people's back yards! We stayed with the Roddy's. Clarence Roddy, then a homiletics professor at Fuller Seminary, had been Mom and Dad's pastor in Portland, Maine and his wife was a significant mentor to my Mom. They had a lemon tree and a fig tree in their backyard. I had my first fig. An acquired taste, they are good when they are ripe right from the tree.

Except for being smooshed in the Plymouth, the whole trip was an adventure of discovery.