Notes from the road
We’re in the Southwest for the holiday break, driving a roughly 1600 mile loop from Phoenix to Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon to Sedona and back to Phoenix. So far so good; I’m sipping a glass of wine right now on our patio at Inn Of The Governors just off the plaza in Santa Fe. Tomorrow (Monday) it’s off to Taos, into Georgia O’Keefe country, then up through the smoking embers around Los Alamos with a pit stop for the night in Farmington, NM and then off to the Grand Canyon on Tuesday.
Observations so far:
Arizona was unsurprisingly hot (116 degrees, but, like everyone says, it’s a dry heat) and surprisingly boring, at least until we got up to Holbrook (a one horse town that time forgot if there ever was one) which is where it turned downright catatonic. This burg used to be one of the high points along old Route 66 from Chicago to LA; when the highway was rerouted onto Interstate 40 sometime in the 60’s or 70’s, it seems to have literally rerouted the life right of this community along with it. By Holbrook standards, we had a first-class evening; we stayed at a marginal Travelodge, ate takeout from Pizza Hut, and bought a bottle of wine to help wash down the sadness of the place at a Circle K convenience store. The thought occurred to me that if I had ever been in a place that seemed pregnant with the possibility of an imminent holdup and shootout, it was that particular Circle K convenience store on that particular Friday night with this particular sucker standing in line holding a particularly unimpressive bottle of hooch and trying not to look quite so “not from around these parts”. If life is too short to drink bad wine, as the bumper sticker says, it’s way too short to get shot while trying to buy some.
After dinner I halfheartedly shot the decaying hulk of an abandoned old tourist trap next door and a Mexican restaurant across the street. Old Route 66 was nearly deserted for the hour it took to make these shots. A cop car didn’t even slow down as it passed, although I did get the hairy eyeball from a guy in a pickup truck who stopped as I folded up my tripod and headed back to the motel room.
The high point of Holbrook, other than the Circle K convenience store, was the Wigwam Motel just off route 66. An icon of 50’s roadside kitsch, the collection of concrete teepees circles a parking lot filled with rotting old American jalopies, as if Sinatra, James Dean and Elvis had all stopped in to bunk down one night in 1958 and never checked out. We had tried to book a room for the previous evening, but, alas, others beat us to it. So we stopped and shot pictures, and I was rewarded with the best from the trip so far. This is what the place really looks like:
Things got good on Saturday, as we headed for the New Mexico border with a detour through the Petrified Forest / Painted Desert National Monument. This was more like what we were expecting to see! It almost turned out badly, though. The ranger at the entrance station told us that there would be “no collecting” in the park, which meant we couldn’t pick up rocks, petrified wood, fossils, or other interesting little goodies we might stumble across. Now, here’s the thing: I love to pick up interesting little goodies and have quite a collection from my travels, including two I had picked up just the previous day during a hike in Tonto National Forest. When the ranger asked if we had any rocks in the car, I of course answered “no…wait, yes”. Raising one eyebrow, she asked to see them, and then produced a red magic marker and scrawled a big X across the two of them. Leaving the park several hours later, we had an exit interview with another older ranger as we left the park; he looked at me suspiciously and asked with a thin smile “did you have a good time?” “It was great”, I chirped. Trying to distract him from what I was sure would be a mandatory strip search, I piped up cheerily “we even saw a little tornado forming in the desert back there- tumbleweeds almost flew in the window!” “Dust devils”, he intoned with a crooked little Dick Cheney sneer. “Dust devils is what you saw.”
Dust devils is what we saw. I stepped on it and got out of there fast.
Late in the afternoon we took a Lonely Planet-inspired detour through Zuni territory on the way to Albuquerque, and stopped for dinner at the highly recommended Lady Stagecoach Café in a wide spot in the road called Ramah, NM. The joint shared a dirt lot with the local volunteer fire department and, judging from the assortment of white elephants stacked near the front door, the local second-hand kitchen appliance department as well. Four vehicles were snugged up against the sagging front porch when we nosed our shiny rented Ford Fusion in tentatively: two pickup truck-like rigs and two somewhat menacing looking Harley Davidson motorcycles. “Let’s go back to the Pizza Hut in Holbrook”, I said to Jenny. “I don’t have a good feeling about this one…” “C’mon” she says. “Where’s your spirit of adventure? It was in Lonely Planet fer God’s sake. It has to be good.”
So we walk in, and… remember those scenes in the old western movies where the tall, dark stranger bursts through the swinging doors into the saloon and everybody shuts up and turns around, the piano player stops playing, and the bartender starts to put the good whiskey safely away under the counter? Well, none of that happened, since this place didn’t have a piano, a bar, or anyone under 60 who could turn around very fast. But it did have a table of bikers (one of whom kept shooting weird sidelong glances at Jenny), a 400 pound guy equipped with an oxygen tank slumped back in his chair eating fried sopaipillas, and a proud oldtimer talking about his grandfather coming to the area because of “LDS”, reminding us that, in this part of the country at least, not everybody associates Mormonism with South Park and Mitt Romney. The food was surprisingly good (just like the Lonely Planet writer said) and all in all, the Lady Stagecoach Café was a memorable episode in what was becoming a classic American road trip.
