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After visiting the Flagstaff public library in the morning, I made my way east towards Holbrook on I-40. The
largest area of clearing was in the White Mountains and north up to the Holbrook area and into Navaho County,
AZ. Because I was in the area so early in the day, I visited Petrified Forest National Park, thinking I would do the normal
tourist thing then head south into the mountains towards my forecast area. Well, as it turned out the storms decided to form right on top of the park
at the time I arrived..
One of the most amazing sights I've seen in a long time was daytime lightning over the Painted Desert of Arizona. Again the thunderstorms had formed too early in the day to be any use to me, but just watching the storms was enough. The two or three thunderstorms which travelled through the area dumped a large amount of rain as they moved slowly south out of the park. At about 5:00pm AZT I headed back to the city of Holbrook and visited the public library, where I saw on radar only stroms out west of Phoenix and then others over in the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma. I should have been home that day. I decided to cut my vacation short by one day and head east towards home, hoping to catch a thunderstorm or two in central New Mexico on the way. The pattern didn't look that promising for Arizona for the next two days, so I figured I would have better results following the low east. At sunset I arrived in Gallup to a small thunderstorm travelling slowly south, with very frequent lightning. I stopped a number of times along I-40 to set up my tripod and camera, but for the most part I kept getting rained out. I will try to visit Arizona again in August of 2002. My results were not as good as what Dave Crowley or Gene Rhoden got, but I enjoyed the vacation. 
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