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Friday, April 27, 2007

Route 66 Day 6 Photo 6


Hills south of Gila Bend heading toward Organ Pipe National Monument. Do you hear Ennio Morricone music? I think I see The Man with No Name riding on a horse with a wide brimmed hat, cape and cigar.

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Route 66 Day 6 Photo 3-5

April 7, morning, Gila Bend: Space Age Lodge and Restaurant. Here was the space place that was a bit too pricey for us to spend the night...but that didn't prevent us from eating breakfast there the next morning. I look a little funny in the picture because I'm sticking my tongue out at Stan. The restaurant supposedly burned down a few years ago and what you see now is a rebuilt version. I love the blue tile. Next time, I think I will splurge on a room. In fact, I want the whole restaurant as my kitchen.

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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Route 66 Day 6 Photo 1-2

April 7, morning, Gila Bend, AZ: This is the Yucca Motel where we stayed the night before, plus a scene of its surrounding area with native plantlife. Now supposedly we stayed here 20 years ago on our big circular trip around the west in late May and early June of 1987, however, that might be disputable, now that some time has passed and I've had time to think. On the other end of the main business drag, there was a motel, now closed down, called "Desert Inn" which also has a pool in front, well, had. When we would've pulled in to Gila Bend late at night back in '87 after a very long drive across the California desert after the very horrible border crossing experience at San Ysidro earlier in the day, the Desert Inn would've been the first motel to greet us traveling east as we entered the main business loop off the interstate. Could it be that we actually stayed at The Desert Inn rather than the Yucca Motel? I didn't keep a journal back then, so there'd be no way to know. Stan says he remembers that it was the Yucca, and I honestly don't know.

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

Route 66 Day 5 Photo 3

April 6, northeast Phoenix, Arizona, late afternoon. A shot from the car window at some interesting rock formations with assorted cactii. We spent this entire day driving all around the Phoenix metropolitan area trying to find greenhouses Stan had tracked down on the web. The first one was the most successful.

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Route 66 Day 5 Photos 1-2

April 6, Rest Stop in Arizona, morning. The previous night we had tried to get a place to stay in Flagstaff, but the prices scared us off. One hotel clerk said they were getting filled up with vacationing Californians. So we headed on down the road to Camp Verde, which was a very nice, and a little less expensive, stay. In the morning we headed south to Phoenix and stopped at this Rest Stop on I-17. (we are not on Route 66 anymore with the remaining photos). This is definitely one of my top 3 rest stops, the other two being the Wisconsin Welcome Center on US-151 before you get to Dubuque, IA--the dogs LOVE this place because there's a big dewey meadow to run around in early in the morning on our trips to Colorado, and the Iowa Welcome Center in Council Bluffs at exit 1B on I-80 which features natural prairie plantings, a zillion crickets and butterflies and WiFi access. This rest stop overlooks a valley filled with plants that are transitional between the hot desert of Phoenix and the northern forests of Flagstaff. Going south past the rest stop on the other side of the hill, the Pines change to Saguaros. Stan had taken a couple pictures of me, but I was squinting, so I decided to use my picture of him instead.

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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Route 66 Day 4 Photo 14

Here's the cactus Stan mentioned in his comment in the post below--he wanted me to post it. It's smaller than a baseball and bigger than a golfball. It was cute.

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Route 66 Day 4 Photos 10-13



April 5: Meteor Crater, inbetween Winslow and Flagstaff. We got there very late in the afternoon, shortly before they closed. We've been by here before, in 1987 and in 1999. In 1999 it was raining torrents, so that's why we didn't stop then. I'm not sure what was up in 1987--maybe we didn't know about it. We didn't want to miss it this time, despite the late afternoon time. I would've liked to take more time, but that was not to be. The crater was huge, much too big to stand at the viewing dock and get it all in one shot, hence the two small shots on top (not a perfectly seamless panorama, sorry). There were some kinds of scientific instruments at the bottom, which are in the pictures at the left. We bought some space food sticks in the gift shop....very pricey, but yummy. We ate them later at assorted times in assorted hotel rooms.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Route 66 Day 4 Photos 4-9

"
This is the cheesey part of the trip
This is the trip, the cheesey part
I really cringe
What'd he say?
Yeah!
Yeah, right!
Pretty cheesey, huh
Huh!
Yeah, I'm embarrassed to be a part of this number
"*

oops...paraphrased wrong LA-based band there...

Allright, how about:

Well, Im a standing on a corner...


In winslow, arizona
And such a fine sight to see



Its a girl, my lord, in a flatbed
Ford slowin down to take a look at me


OK, how about...


Well, Im a standing on a corner
In Windblown Arizona
And such a welcome sight to see



Its a dog, my lord, in a flatbed
Ford



slowin down to take a look at me

Yes, this was Winslow, Arizona, and they dedicated this corner on Route 66 to that Eagles song. There is no picture of me here so that I couldn't be blackmailed by punks and serious music people from my past, plus, I was having a really bad hair day. Trust me, you don't want to see a picture of me standing next to that skinny bronze sculpture. I hate bronze sculptures...whether they're skinny pseudo rockstars or the multitude of gleeful children in the Fort Collins/Loveland area. Their faces look deformed. Anyway, I much prefer the skinny wooden cowboy when it comes to cheesey Route 66 images, but most of all, I love the bulldog. But what was that about? A bulldog in a flatbed ford? Is it a takeoff on the girl-in-the-ford "window reflection" painting on the side of the building? It was right there, on the side street just a few feet away from starving bronze rockstar dude. There were also a lot of people (tourists) milling around trying to get a picture of themselves with bronzeboy, so fortunately we didn't accidentally shoot anyone...heh.

*paraphrased from The Doors' Soft Parade during one of Jim's stream of conscience ramblings.

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Monday, April 16, 2007

Route 66 Day 4 Photos 2-3

These are the red cliffs on the border of New Mexico and Arizona. I had a great dream several years ago about this area, that I was flying down I-40, through these hills. It was a great dream. I've been through here a couple times before this, so it wasn't like it was a psychic dream or anything.

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Sunday, April 15, 2007

Route 66 Day 4 Photo 1

Red Cliffs on the mountains in northwestern New Mexico heading west on Route 66 toward Gallup. Not a bad picture considering I shot this through the car window while we were moving about 60 mph!

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Saturday, April 14, 2007

Route 66 Day 12-End; DREAMs

The night before last I dreamt I had found a really cool rock with white quartz-like crystals surrounded by thin fibre-like hematite crystals.

I also dreamt there were two children Stan and I were going to adopt because they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wouldn't have cost us anything, except we'd be in debt having to support two children.

Unfortunately, the first dream wasn't true. Fortunately, the last dream wasn't true either.

Yesterday we left the graveyard-like silent hotel (I'm considering using a Super 8 next time rather than this old standby that seems to degenerate each time it changes management and ownership) and got some of the world's most delicious coffee for the road. We stopped at a rest stop in Iowa and tried to call Camp K9 where our animals are being boarded to let them know we'll be picking them up on Saturday. We could not get through...a pre-recorded message came on the phone that said "this line is being checked for trouble". WTF? Naturally, when you're 400 some miles away, the last thing you want to hear is that there's trouble with the place you're trying to get ahold of, where your precious furbabies are. I tried to tell myself that it's just their phone that's having trouble, not the place itself. Nonetheless, I was worried and my stomach was turning somersaults, especially with the huge amount of caffeine I was ingesting that I hadn't experienced the whole trip. Had Madison's late spring snow storm damaged storm lines? What if there was a fire? What if there was some disaster? Finally as we got closer to Des Moines, Stan finally reached them. Yes, it was just the phone lines. Why on earth does the phone company use such language? "This line is being checked for trouble?" Why not problems instead of trouble? That's a less severe sounding word, and problems does sound more like technical issues with the phone line itself whereas trouble sounds more serious, and not necessarily just phone-line/technical issues related.

Anyway, we got our animals back. Persephone, who greeted us when we came home yesterday, wouldn't shut up. She was non-stop catterwauling (sp?) all night long, so much that Stan had to use earplugs. I slept through it, but her wails and cries mutated into shapes in my dozing mind, starfish and swirling stars and anemones, piled on top of eachother like her successive meows.

When we brought the other animals home from camp this morning, she shut up. Maybe the only reason she kept meowing was to tell us the rest of her family was missing.

I have a bunch of work to catch up on now that I'm home, but I'll try to post the rest of the pictures as I have time. This should keep everyone amused for quite a few more days to come, even though the trip is now over.

One last thing...we had the absolute most PERFECT weather the whole time! Maybe a few drops of rain while we were driving for the entire trip, only a couple threatening skies that never did anything. You couldn't have imagined or asked for better weather, especially with all the BAD weather the rest of the country was having! Madison got hammered with a big snowfall this past Wednesday, but when we got home, most of it had melted. Then, parts of the country where we had been--Albuquerque through Kansas--had a stormfront pass through it a day after we left. We were very lucky. I guess it made up for last fall when Stan and I had beautiful weather in Montrose while we had to stay and help his mom after surgery, but after she got more independent and we could take day trips, it rained and got cold.

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Friday, April 13, 2007

Route 66 Day 3 Photos 17-19

April 3, morning: Although we actually saw this roadside attraction in Conway, Texas prior to Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, I decided to post the other one first since this is a parody of it. This is "Bug Ranch", and the planted cars are VW Beetles.



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Thursday, April 12, 2007

Route 66, Day 11

We're almost home! Oklahoma's panhandle was cold waking up to, with cloud cover and wet streets...it must have rained overnight but I heard nothing. We drove to Liberal, KS, which is the "adopted" home of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (no mention was ever made in the book or movie to exactly *where* she lived other than in SW KS). Although Stan bought me a ruby slippers pin (so I can get out of Kansas and back home to my Emerald City), we didn't do other touristy things there, neither did we in Dodge City, other than take photos of the museum outside made to look like an old western town. Just as well we didn't--it took a long time to drive through KS and up to Lincoln, NE to get the best coffee in the world and a room for the night. I could've used that coffee 10 hours ago. I dozed practically all the way here (no, I was not driving). It's just that...a combination of no caffeine, ibuprofen, and Kansas landscape makes for a somniforous drive.

We stocked up on bags of beans at Panache the coffeehouse and got two big drinks to go. Mine was practically a meal by itself, so I only got a side salad at the Perkins by our hotel. Stan has this weird personality trait I refer to as "food swings". He has this thing against Iceberg lettuce, like serious antagonism toward it. Like, I envision his fantasies of him taking an ancient medieval Japanese sword and chopping airborne heads of iceberg like an angry John Belushi Samurai Chef as they fly past his head. I know it's not the healthiest green you can eat, but it's better for you than, say, a chicken and cheese quesadilla, which is what Stan ordered instead of some large chef's salad because they were out of Romaine lettuce. Whatever.

During dinner, I managed to put a large gash in my lip because my tooth slipped on a crouton. We felt it was a very Seinfeld moment. Elaine, Jerry, George and Kramer are sitting around discussing times when they've accidentally inflicted severe pain on themselves. The guys are describing really macho, painful activities, and Elaine says, "Well one time I was eating a big salad and my tooth slipped on a crouton and it put a huge gash in my lip. It was really painful. I couldn't drink orange juice for days." There's a moment of silence while the guys stare dumfounded at Elaine and make fun of her because that's just not as painful as ways they've hurt themselves. Suddenly, George's face puckers into a mangled expression, and wouldn't you know it, his tooth slipped on the T-bone of his steak and he put a huge gash in his lip. George can't talk properly now, his lip is in pain. He has a job interview scheduled for the next day, which he does go to, but his lip is swollen, it looks like he has an oral herpes, and he's speaking like Kramer on Novocaine. Naturally, George doesn't get the job and Elaine gets the last laugh...until she injures herself in a very macho way.

Tomorrow will be like any day in the fall coming back from a Colorado trip...except it will be spring. We'll stop at Harvey's in Iowa, not that we didn't get enough cactii in Arizona, but this is for the spring garden instead.

And I miss my dogs terribly.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Route 66, Day 10

This morning we headed out to Magdelena, NM (sp?). Supposedly there was a place there where you could pay a fee to enter an area to find rocks. We never did it. The road was 13 miles long, rocky (4WD material) and with no cellphone service. Maybe if we had a 4WD, but we don't. We found a rockshop on the edge of town where we found a few small things anyway. So we headed to Albuquerque. We decided to take the remaining Route 66 that we missed on the way in last Thursday, and we're so glad we did! We found *the* rockshop, Southwestern Minerals located right on that route in Albuquerque, and I finally got my Rainbow Calcite! Not a cut gem (that would've been hugely expensive, no doubt!) but a nice rectangular specimen piece (they cleave in rectangular shapes). We decided on the spur of the moment not to take the interstates 40-44-55-35 back, but to take 40 to Highway 54 in Tucumcari, and head on up to Dodge City, KS tomorrow. We tried staying the night in Dalhart, Texas, but rooms were outrageously expensive for a little town with not much business. Plus one of the desk clerks creeped me out. So we decided to head up the road to Guymon, OK, which is significant because that's where Stan's sister lived for 10-15 years or so. Rooms were a little cheaper than the Super 8 in Dalhart, and definitely worth it to get away from a crusty hotel clerk, but also it gets us further down the highway and a better start on the morning. Texas definitely doesn't want us. Supposedly there's some "Dorothy's House" (Oz) in Liberal, KS, and I've been wanting to see Dodge City (Marshal Dillon! Miss Kitty! Festus!) for quite a while now, even if it is just a little hole in the wall tourist trap like Tombstone. Later, we'll head up to Lincoln, NE so we can get the best coffee in the world. Even somewhat good coffee was sorely lacking on this trip! When all this is over with, we will have driven through 10 states (counting Wisconsin)!

No time to post pictures tonight...we barely got a room and settled in in time for LOST.

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Route 66, Day 10 DREAM: Picker

Stan and I were at an airport and we were either picking up Stan's mom or she was there to pick us up, however I was asking questions that implied that I hadn't taken a flight. The weather was bad and I was saying i didn't want to fly through a snowstorm. Then I had to use the bathroom, but all the stalls could be seen into. Instead of having a large metal door, the door was composed of metal strips, some of which were falling off and askew, so people could see in. I went into a stall anyway, sat down, but didn't pull my pants down because people kept looking in. One of the people who came up to my stall to look in was someone I knew in jr/sr. high school, *e*b*e H*f*e*b*r. I decided to pick my nose while looking her right in the eye, and that got rid of her. Funny that looking at someone sitting on a toilet isn't enough to move on, but bring out the old nose pick, and that'll do the magic. Later the dream progressed to watching kids chasing dogs chasing cats, but that was interrupted by a very weird IRL phone call to our hotel room at 6:15 in the AM.

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Route 66, Day 9

Nothing much at all happened today, except for finding a few rocks at a rockshop in Deming, NM. It was very windy on both I-10 and I-25. We decided to take I-25 north up to Socorro rather than going around White Sands again, just because we've never seen that part of the state. Well, next time, we won't. This has got to be some of the most boring parts of New Mexico. Just over the mountain ridge by White Sands and Alamagordo, it's very interesting with nut orchards and varied topography. We got the same hotel, EconoLodge in Socorro, where we stayed at in 2005 coming back from Roswell, and where the wind is still howling like a banshee just like that first night. We ate dinner at the ElCamino next door, my biggest meal so far this trip (Chile Relleno and Cheese Enchilada). Maybe we'll find some place to get rocks tomorrow, maybe not. We've lucked out a little so far in that department.

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Monday, April 09, 2007

Route 66 Day 3 Photos 7-16: All Ten Caddies










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Route 66 Day 3 Photo 4-6

April 4, around 2:30 pm, Amarillo, TX:

The famous not-to-be-missed Cadillac Ranch isn't actually on Route 66, but it's not far away. This is an ever-changing exhibit of planted Caddies that would make all my former art professors cringe in horror (yes!) as it changes its colors periodically thanks to anyone armed with a can of paint or a marker. Darn, I forgot to bring my spray can supply on this trip....I guess there's always something you forget to take with you.

The display is located out in a cow pasture, and there's some strange artifacts you can find on the ground other than discarded markers and spray can tops, one of which was a gold spray-painted cowpie. I've always wanted to do that, but with gold leaf.

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