Wanderung 3

Rocky Mountain Ramble

May - July 2003

July 7th - Flagstaff, Arizona

Given our experience the previous day, we wanted to do the Flagstaff Volksmarch (a Route 66 event!) as early in the day as possible. So we jumped out of bed around 6, enjoyed the complementary breakfast, and headed off to the starting point for our walk, ironically at another Ramada Inn about 3 miles down the road.

The Flagstaff Route 66 Volksmarch winds its way toward town along an urban pathway. We turned left at a large domed assembly hall kind of building to walk thru the Northern Arizona University campus—I saw an old observatory building right beside the street and wondered how they coped with the light and vibration from all the passing cars. Adjacent to the university campus was a “campus town” type of district that led up to the railroad tracks and a historic downtown area.

I was surprised at the number of New Age businesses along the way. They ranged from a store specializing in crystals to a palm reader/psychic and holistic chiropractor. The chiropractor, as you might expect from someone specializing in subluxations of the spine, had used “wholistic” instead of “holistic” on his sign. Of course, maybe he meant that he was entirely there while manipulating spines, but it’s had to imagine somebody thumping on your back while being partly somewhere else, isn’t it? Or maybe he meant he treated the whole spine rather than separate vertebrae—but I’ve never heard of chiropractors who specialize in certain vertebrae so that’s probably not it either. The palm reader had a special rate of $10, and since I’m a sucker for sales I was tempted to zip in and have my palm read, but it was hot and we were getting in a hurry to finish so we continued on.

The walk rout next took us around a nice little neighborhood with several eccentric homes and back downtown where we stopped at the visitor center in the railroad station. There I bought a Route 66 sticker for the truck. I ceremoniously stuck it on the tailgate after the walk, so now our Tundra is decorated with stuffed animals and a GPS on the dashboard, red and green stoplight men from East Germany on the side windows, and a Route 66 sticker on the upper left part of the tailgate. There must be hundreds of Desert Sand Toyota Tundras decorated exactly like that, but if you do see us be sure to stop and chat a while, or if we’re not there, leave a message under the windshield and we’ll get back to you.

From the Visitor Center we walked back along the old Route 66 and got a good impression of what the old Route 66 was like. In the downtown area we saw a five-story high old tower advertising a motel for $5.00 a night, surely a sign from the 30s or 40s! As we walked back from the downtown area we saw the typical Route 66 scenery of motels, gas stations, and even a roadside diner with a flashy neon sign.

Due to the altitude, I felt a little breathless during this walk and was breathing mainly thru my mouth—I was astonished how quickly my throat was drying out. We saw on the Weather Channel that the humidity in this area was only 15%, and for the first time I saw a Heat Index that was lower than the actual temperature. Of course, when the temperature is 94 degrees and the Heat Index is 92 degrees, it probably doesn’t make a hill of beans difference, but that’s the way it was in Arizona.

Climbing back into our air-conditioned truck, we started our drive to Albuquerque, keeping the speeds down to avoid over-heating the tires. I was happy to see no sign of overheating for the engine or transmission because it was a barren, under populated area to break down and we occasionally did see an abandoned car or one with the hood up beside the road. We passed by some areas that looked like the fresh lava flows we had seen in Hawaii, and my brother later said that they were in fact relatively fresh, being about 10,000 years old. I just had never realized how widespread the volcanic activity is and has been around this part of the west.

We also saw the occasional hitchhiker, and that surprised me quite a bit. We just don’t see hitchhikers anymore out east, and it brought back memories of my on attempt at hitchhiking back from a scientific conference in Pheonix in the 70s. Quite unexpectedly a cloudburst opened up while I was waiting with my little sign saying “Chicago” just north of town and I got soaked even though I was standing in the desert—just my luck. Nobody stopped to pick me up that morning until a guy in a Volkswagen bus pulled over and gave me a ride. When I asked him, ever the scientist, why he picked me up and other folks didn’t, he said, “Well, you are soaking wet and they probably didn’t want to ruin their upholstery—I got plastic seats in this and it would hurt them at all”! We had a nice chat and he drove me to Oklahoma City as I recall. Still, things have changed nowadays and I would think the hitchhikers would be risking heatstroke by waiting in 100 degree heat and possibly other things after they’re picked up, but there they were.

We stopped at an official New Mexico rest area and what a god-awful place it was! The place was surrounded by a high cyclone fence with barbed wire at the top, making it look very much like a prison. The pavement was all buckled, the traffic pattern made you drive around in circles, the picnic areas had multiple “Do NOT” warnings plastered on them, and the bathrooms were dirty. It looked to us like New Mexico was trying to warn off visitors not to stay in this state—very strange.

New Mexico has also followed the dubious lead of Colorado, Utah, and Arizona in “privatizing” the printing of state road maps. Instead of a good state-issued map with all the primary and secondary roads listed like we have back east, these maps are printed by Best Western and feature big red stars in any city that has a Best Western located in it. That’s just mildly irritating, but the maps are really substandard and do not show all the relevant state roads. My advice would be to buy the big Rand McNally Road Atlas or its equivalent and just forget about official state maps out here—gambling casinos you will find aplenty but no decent state maps.

Speaking of casinos, we did make a stop at the Golden Eagle Casino just across the Rio Grand from Albuquerque. They had a Dairy Queen and were offering two Blizzards for the price of one, and I just couldn’t resist that deal. I had an Oreo—big chunks of Oreo cookies in it—and Monika had a Butterfinger since they didn’t offer Heath Bar. Despite this (unnecessary?) delay, we arrived in Albuquerque in time to get our targeted hotel room for the next few nights, take baths, set up our room, and finish the Elizabeth Peters novel we had been reading.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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