route 66 guide arizona
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Route66 V: Rust and Indians Streams toward Arizona

PHOTOS RUTA66: UNAI ONA

FROM TUCUMCARI TO SANTA ROSA: ALIENS AND THE WORLD'S WORLD'S WORST EXCAVATOR

The sunrise makes tucumcari return to a strange stillness. With the light of the day all that nocturnal lysergia of lights and neons disappears. It is then when, barely visible the memory of the times in which Route 66 was the "Main street of America", the desert arises amid the morning dew. A dusty plain, a huge sky, an eerie silence and a long horizon before your feet. Seeing it like this, it is not surprising that, not yet reaching 6000 inhabitants, Tucumcari is the setting for many films.

Of course, almost all with a disturbing component. It is what has the arid solitude of these places. From radio amateurs looking for extraterrestrial life in the miniseries Taken to the beginning of 'Death Had a Price'. Come on, if you decide to take a walk around you can choose your paranoia. The first option is to have a digital rectal examination by Roswell-style alien toilets. The second is to be beaten at the hands of sour-smelling outlaws. We highly value cleanliness and exotic cultures. If you like the other option, yourself.

As it was, we decided to get in the car and put our feet in the dust. Of course, not without first taking a tour of the local museum of the Tucumcari Convention Center (1500 Rte 66). It contains a wide collection of classic cars, as well as information about Route 66 and the neighboring hill of Tucumcari. A flattened top formation that gives identity to its area; perfect place for the landing of some flying saucer wanting to spree earthlings. Leaving the museum we pass two typical motels on Route 66: the bockaroo (1315 Rte66) and the Tristar Inn Express (1302 E Rte 66).

From here we set out on a hundred kilometers of typical American highway. With the straight line defining the horizontal and vertical planes. The right time to drive calmly and calmly. A soporific experience for those who yearn to squirm on the chassis of a Lotus, but wonderful if you are looking Lay back in the bench seat of a Cadillac convertible. However, remember to leave your moment "I like to drive" upon reaching the height of Cuervo. In this abandoned town you can find rusty cars and abandoned houses where pioneers of Route 66 lived.

By the way, we have not told you before but we tell you now. Going to the United States does not require the vaccinations of those who are heading to the Rwandan jungle, but if you are going to explore among rusty iron looking for the essence of Route66… We do recommend caution against tetanus. Something that you should not have when you arrive in Santa Rosa. Here the truck workshop welcomes Napa Auto Care Center (4000-4076 Will Rogers Dr), within which you can also see some typical pantagruélicos trucks. One of those with a latest generation BMW grille. Enormous.

A few meters from there is the Route 66 Auto Museum (2436 Historic Rte 66). Another of the exhibitions run by motor enthusiasts along Route 66. Here you will find more than thirty classics, including a good selection of Hot Rods but also 1931s Cadillacs, first-batch Muscle Cars and even a XNUMX Auburn for sale. Anyway, one of the most interesting things about the museum is to catch its founder there: the restorer Bozo Cordova.

A man who has the same scruples toward the Ford Edsel as about his wardrobe: none. If in the second he does not hesitate to combine dart pants with a nineties tracksuit jacket, with the first his pulse does not tremble when it comes to turning him into an excavator. Ok that the Edsel was a fiasco in every way, even capable of putting the survival of a Ford in a serious trance that lost more than 250 million of the time with the model, but… Precisely for that reason today it is an interesting classic. Anyway, if some called him "The worst car in the world" maybe we are before “The worst excavator in the world”.

route 66 guide arizona

LEAVING VEGAS SIDEWAY TO A DATE WITH ARCHIE

Beyond this museum of classics with its passionate founder, in Santa Rosa you can find all the flavor of Ruta66 thanks to a panoply of vintage hotels, gas stations and restaurants. Is the The Table Motel (2383 Rte 66) with its striking neon, the Happy motoring station (3469 I-40BL) with a very curious rationalist architecture in these parts, the one left to oblivion Saharan Parking (979 I-40BL) or the Route 66 Restaurant (2295 Rte 66) with steaks and Mexican food. A trucker stomach pump.

Before leaving Santa Rosa one runs into the Cowboy Jim's (446 Rte 66). A priori, this small abandoned restaurant has nothing special. However, on your doorstep there is an old abandoned fridge. What will be inside? If we were somewhere else, we would not mind the least, however we are going to head to the Mojave Desert. Such a strange place where we can find a phone booth in the middle of nowhere. Now it has no line, but Until the early 2000s you called 760-733-9969 and some bizarre tourist used to get.

Anyway, lonely places, too much exposure to the sun ... In places like this, anything can happen. Leaving Santa Rosa We found a detour to Las Vegas just 20 kilometers away, which sounds tempting for a few seconds. One is visualized as Hunter S. Thompson writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and says… "Well, maybe it wouldn't be bad.". But really Las Vegas is a city where you should only go to die. To die drinking like Nicholas Cage in 'Living Las Vegas'.

If not, you're going to be like another Sunday nighter leaving there with empty pockets and nothing really fun to say. Just what the creators were looking for when building the city: take money from the boring middle class in search of consumption-based leisure. Thus it is better to stay on Route 66, asphalt explorer. If you do, you will have to continue about 70 more kilometers until you reach Moriarty. This town coincides with the last name of Sherlock Holmes' worst enemy: the "Napoleon of Crime" Professor James Moriarty.

And be careful, because there is a clear connection between this sinister antagonist and the museum for which we stop here. If the first was fond of sending people to the cemetery ... The second is a true motor graveyard. Its about Lewis Antique Auto & Toy Museum (905 Rte 66). A rust paradise with more than 700 cars and trucks languishing under a blazing sun. The perfect place to spend your idle hours searching and searching for some interesting framework.

Of course, in this case you can do it with the help of the founder himself. At 82, Archie is still a top-tier foodie, living his passion like the first day he bought a Ford Model T when he was only 9 years old. Yes, when other children asked their parents for a brand new bicycle Archie wanted a used car to get his hands on the nuts in the company of his mechanic father. An early vocation that has grown to form a kind of junkyard-museum with all kinds of popular North American classics.

However, stored in a warehouse it also preserves about 40 cars in perfect condition. A state as good as his memory, as Archie explains the history of each model with devotion. Another one of those exciting encounters on Ruta66, where it is so easy to become infected with passions as sick as they are fascinating. Do you see how it was better to skip the detour to Las Vegas? Overall, without Sinatra on stage there is no reason to go there.

FROM ALBUQUERQUE TO GALLUP: A SIESTA WITH RONALD REAGAN

With monochromatic vision set to rust brown we continue to Albuquerque. The grid layout reminds us of its founding as a Spanish colonial town in 1706. Basically the theme consisted of planting a church, a plaza, a government building ... And around all the possible houses and orchards, which was relatively simple thanks to the vicinity of the Rio Grande. The same one that downstream acts as a border between the United States and Mexico, passing through lands that were Hispanic and before multiple tribes. Because civilizations pass, but borders remain.

route 66 guide arizona

With almost 600.000 inhabitants Albuquerque is a residential city where you can stop to eat in places like the 66 diner (1405 Central Ave NE). A good part of the 1946 Phillips gas station is still preserved here, which was renovated in 1987, mutating into the restaurant that we can see today. Great burgers, hearty shakes and staff dressed like the fifties. Come on, a macrocaloric menu wrapped in the aesthetics of a time when sugar was still our sweetest friend.

If you like chemistry at a different level than gastronomy, remember that here you have a route through the Breaking Bad stages. Methamphetamine and the drug trade as a desperate response to a country without social security; because under a history of delinquency there is always the record of some raw times. Leaving Walter White's truck behind, you have to continue 20 kilometers north to the town of Río Bravo. There is the J&R Vintage Auto Museum & Bookstore (3650A NM-528).

They have about 80 American classics -pre-war abounding- but, above all, with a well-kept magazine and book store. On their counters you can find out-of-print magazines and multitude of books on the history of American motorsport. Trademark monographs are very interesting in its catalog. After acquiring encyclopedias of Duesenberg and Lincoln Motor Company his thing is to leave before leaving the budget in books on anything that has to do with Ken Miles or Detroit Electric.

With a good dose of paper documentation already in the suitcase, you have to take the I40 towards Grants. This is one of the longest non-stop sections of our journey along Route 66. However, we must be attentive to the bridge over the Puerco River: a metal framework from 1933 born in the heat of the road expansion. In addition, in Grants you have the station Charlie's Radiator Service (81308 W Santa Fe Ave), the Hollywood diner (1017 W Santa Fe Ave) or the huge sign of the old The Roarin 20's (Rte 66 with 3RdSt).

route 66 guide arizona

The last vestiges of a Route66 intimately linked to the place, since thanks to it the carrots that made Grants prosper as a nucleus of agricultural activity came out in tons. Vitamins with one of these fruits that many myopic children were forced to eat (while now they are bought under the name “cool”De crudités) we have to line up our front axle towards Gallup. Here we find three landmark hotels in the history of Ruta66: the Drake Hotel of 1919 (216 E. Rte 66), the Captain Motel of 1955 (1300 E Rte 66) and the Hotel El Rancho (1000 Hwy 66).

In the latter he stayed Ronald Reagan one night. Be careful with which bed you take a nap, do not give up your career in the cinema, the presidency of the Screen Actors Union and the Democratic Party and then go to the Republican, win the elections and deregulate the financial system . Do not forget that there are naps with very strange awakenings. That is why you wake up strange and spend a few hours that you do not seem like you.

FROM GALLUP TO HOLBRROK. ON THE TRACE OF THE INDIANS

35 kilometers later we said goodbye to New Mexico to enter Arizona. After all of the above, we finally entered the wildest part of Route 66. Huge natural spaces, roads that get lost in the horizon line, deserts, Indian vestiges ... Although yes, do not let your illusions fly too much. "Jack London White Label". The first contact with all this is the Lupton's Teepee Trading Post. A service area full of indigenous souvenirs where Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Gerónimo or Crazy Horse are nothing more than a framed memory.

In fact, today his few successors are torn between the devastating rates of alcoholism on the Indian reservations and setting up casinos in which to sell gambling with a neo-Indian touch. However, do not despair. The first because, if you look carefully, the landscape of Arizona will give you many keys to understand the footprint of the Indians. From the territorial Apache to the elusive Navajo, passing through the private and sedentary Yaquis all left traces here.

And the second because idealizing the past only serves to whiten the hateful parts of it. Melville already said what “The past is the manual of tyrants; the future is the Bible of free men ... There are times when it is up to America to create precedents, and not obey them ”. Although of course, the great contradiction of the United States is the same: how the homeland of the Declaration of Independence and Benjamin Franklin can also be that of indigenous extermination and racial segregation.

route 66 guide arizona

As far as we are concerned, something very important must be taken into account: here the distances start to get bigger. As for the refueling, the food and the time change. Of course, remember that as we move west it is the good change, the one in which you win an hour lounging in bed, for example. We must also bear in mind that in Arizona the historical association for Route66 has a kind of Compostela, which you seal in ten points until you get the certification.

It is signed by the Ruta66 expert Ángel Delgadillo, whom we will introduce you to on our way through Seligman. Penetrating 80 kilometers inland we reached Painted DesertAs long as we do not pass the detour at exit 311. The site leaves you like the tree trunks near this point: petrified. From the height of this viewpoint a vast reddish landscape opens up, a sample of the immense territories of the Wild West and a prelude to what we will later see in the Grand Canyon area.

route 66 guide arizona

That if, even in this place totally dominated by the overwhelming natural landscape we stop perceiving the footprint of Route66. And it is that in the neighbor Lacey point We found the shell of an American classic that traveled the route during its early years. Years that it is easy to relive in the last point of this stage, Holbrook, since in its streets we come across a multitude of classics used in the daily lives of the neighbors.

Like the night before in Tucumcari, reaching Holbrook at sunset it ensures us to see the many typical neon signs of Route66. They advertise hotels like the pow-pow or Holbrook Inn, although today's decision has been tipped in favor of the Wigwam Motel (811 W Hopi Dr). Only this one is still active, but the Wigwam grew to seven establishments created in 1950 by Chester E. Lewis, whose family continues to run the hotel. A hotel where the two most characteristic elements of the place are combined: indigenous and automobile cultures.

And the fact is that the rooms resemble Indian teepees, each with an interesting classic parked in the doorway. Can you make a better summary of the day today? We believe not, as does the large public that stays overnight in this hotel, so we recommend that you book in advance. Right next to it you have the restaurant founded in 1858 Butterfield stage (609 W Hopi Dr). Direct heir to an old inn where errands such as the one illustrated on the cover of their menu used to stop. A place of those where you could perfectly meet some vinegary outlaws like the ones we imagine in Tucumcari. Or the kind of aliens that, well, you know, they use their fingers.

What do you think?

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Written by Miguel Sánchez

Through the news from La Escudería, we will travel the winding roads of Maranello listening to the roar of the Italian V12; We will travel Route66 in search of the power of the great American engines; we will get lost in the narrow English lanes tracking the elegance of their sports cars; We will speed up the braking in the curves of the Monte Carlo Rally and we will even get dusty in a garage while rescuing lost jewels.

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