Advertisement
1,000 Cool-Kid Points to anyone that gets the reference in the top picture before they read the Blog Post.
Today was a long day; long in miles and long in time. Yesterday, you see we crossed over to from Texas to New Mexico, meaning we went from Central Time to Mountain Time. Set aside for a moment how entirely ridiculous it is that West Texas should be in the same time zone as Eastern Illinois. The two places are only 1,100 miles apart, after all. In Springfield ILL, by 6am the sun was well over the horizon. In Amarillo TX, it's pitch black at 6am. Add in that today we crossed from New Mexico to Arizona, a peculiar little state in that aside from being the only one of the 50 that doesn't recognize MLK Day as a National Holiday (boo on you, Arizona) it is also the only state that doesn't recognize Daylight Savings Time. That means that despite being in what is ostensibly the Mountain Time Zone, since Spring Forward has already happened the entire state of Arizona is now on the same time as California.
So anyway, point being that we've moved two time zones since
breakfast yesterday morning, which makes for a very long day.
Today's road was by turns wonderful and bothersome. New Mexico continued to enchant, with vista after vista that simply take your breath away. Add in that there was a lot of the original route to be driven through some truly amazing and heartbreaking small towns where there are more empty storefronts than open establishments and 50 cows for every person. Something about that State was mesmerizing and beautiful, and I'll be counting the days until I get to come back and explore it more thoroughly. Arizona, by comparison was thoroughly frustrating. Route 66 in AZ is referred to as "the Broken Road", as so much of it has been erased or simply allowed to fall into such disrepair as to make it impassable. This resulted in LONG stretches on I-40 interspersed with 5-6 mile stretches of the original road. The surroundings are still beautiful, but it's difficult to get as excited about them when you're belting down a three-lane at 75mph with a semi on your ass.
Other observations from the road:
• Winslow, AZ is famous for the reference in the Eagles song (yes, that's the
picture) and that's about it. The corner where they erected the statue and placed the flatbed is very cool and definitely worth the visit. The rest of the town - yeah, not so much. Say it with me in your best Smokey-from-the-movie-Friday voice "Winslow is a Shithole".
• There's a great little hotel in Cubero, AZ called El Rancho, which claims to be the "Hotel to the Stars". As far as I could see from the pictures inside, the only person of interest who's actually visited there is George H.W. Bush. They DID have an awful lot of posters of movies stars hanging on the walls, though. All this aside, it's an incredibly nostalgic place that I'd definitely recommend visiting.
• There's a MA-HOOSIVE hole in the ground about 15 miles north of Flagstaff that is the first-verified and best-preserved meteor impact crater on earth. This mile-wide dent in the Arizona countryside was created about 50,000 years ago when a 150-ft wide meteor smashed into the desert at roughly 26,000mph. The impact created hurricane-force winds across most of what is now the American Southwest and left an incredibly impressive gash in the earth's surface. What's left of the meteor (pictured below) could
fit in a gym-bag, but apparently weighs as much as a VW Bug (the old kind).
Tomorrow, we take another break from 66 and run north from Flagstaff to another big hole in the ground - the Grand Canyon. Expect many pictures, and few words.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.141s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 46; dbt: 0.1158s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb