Day 192 -

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Obfuscator writes: We woke up and continued work on the blog in our Flagstaff motel. The connection had gotten poor during the previous night, and we still had a lot of work to do, so we took advantage of our late checkout time, and got back to it. The connection in the morning was much more stable, and faster, so things went more quickly.

From there, we found a place to get the oil changed. This took quite a bit longer than we would have liked, and involved sitting in the shop, since there didn't seem to be much in the immediate area to see. Eventually we were all done though, and we headed into the center of Flagstaff to see what there was to see. We found a pretty, old downtown with lots of nice looking shops, restaurants, galleries, etc. There was a kind of cool square with a neat mural too.

We found our way into a old catholic church, The Church of the Nativity, which was pretty nifty too. It looks like you would imagine a Gothic church made of adobe would. Eventually we got tired of wandering aimlessly around, and headed for the Arizona Pioneer Museum. In the front of the building, they have a neat lumber train that has been preserved. The museum itself is in the very old county hospital building, and is only about $3, well worth the price. They have a great exhibit on the Beale Expedition, which explored much of northern Arizona, as well as the possibilities of using Camels in the U.S. Army. Ultimately the expedition didn't convince anyone to switch to camels, but it did chart a lot of Arizona land, and plot some good highway routes.

The Museum also has a pretty interesting section on old medical gear, including a sad exhibit on the iron lung. Upstairs, you can find one of the resident nurse's rooms preserved the way it was when the building was a hospital. There's a whole room about lumbering, and another about ranching. Nearby there's a nifty room about the Rough Riders of the Spanish-American War. Finally, there's an exhibit on the Lowell Observatory, which is located in Flagstaff.

When we had seen most of what we cared to see in the museum, we set off to the east, toward the Petrified Forest National Park. We were disappointed when we arrived at our expected camping site, only to find its gates shut. With no other camping sites within about 50 or 60 miles, we drove to the next town and found an affordable motel room, that we weren't at all disappointed with.

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Photos

Camel saddle
perhaps the soldiers would have liked riding them more if they had had a more comfortable saddle.

The Iron lung
I really can't think of anything funny to say about this thing