I am a day late posting this. I will do my best to get another out yet today on our last leg to Yuma.
As predicted we received about three or four inches of new snow at our house yesterday morning. So, waiting to leave until 10:30 instead of 9:00 as planned, we had mostly clear but wet roads as we headed south towards Farmington, New Mexico instead of our usual route, which was west to the Four Corners and across the Diné (Navajo) Reservation, due to the fact the terrain was higher and there was more snow plus it was still snowing.
Farmington to Shiprock and south to Gallup, the empty flatness of the land to the east with the Chuska Mountains to the west was, as always, beautiful. This route still took us through the Diné Reservation which is the largest Native American Reservation in the U.S., occupying probably close to one fourth of the state of Arizona and parts of S.E. Utah and western New Mexico.
After Gallup, we headed west on I-40 at eighty mph across even more barren beautiful empty land that seemed to fall away forever to the south and bordered by a low ridge of cliffs to the north. The sky was now partly sunny with broken clouds and a dry highway.
I-40 is now mostly what was once the now famous ‘Route 66’ and goes by the towns of Holbrook and Winslow. Last year we stayed at the renovated La Posada Hotel, once the stopping off place of famous movie stars, each with a room named afteer them, such as Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, James Cagney and numerous other famous folks such as Albert Einstein. Jackson Browne, who wrote the Eagles song, ‘Standing on a Corner in Winslow Arizona, also has a room named after him. We did not stop this year.
There were numerous T-shirt and souvenir shops at every exit. I even spied a relic of the old highway, a teepee in motel, now in ruins and deserted by all except for desert critters.
This trip reminded me of when I wrote about Jenny and her grandparents coming across the same route, only from Sedona to Durango, in ‘San Juan Sunrise’: <https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/san-juan-sunrise/id1261287101?mt=11&ign-gact=1>.
We arrived at our hotel in Flagstaff right at 4:00.
Ed's Pages 