On the Mother Road, Jack Rabbit to the Painted Desert, AZ

Off we go again!  Much of Route 66 provides some of the most desolate landscape on earth, but its humorous signs are entertaining and meant to entice travelers – to make them think something GREAT is about to appear.

The Jack Rabbit Trading Post outside of Winslow, AZ, opened in 1949, and its owners had the brilliant idea of advertising on the highway as far away as 1000 miles.  Each sign announced the miles left to the shop.

The last sign (see above) is in front of the store. Of course, after this build-up, the exterior of the building is a big let down.

This souvenir shop doesn’t look like much, but we enjoyed the shop’s petrified wood collection, locally made Indian jewelry and fun t-shirts. As usual the locals were friendly folk.

Route 66 has an abundance of motel courts, but the Wigwam Hotel in Holbrook, AZ, tops all of the rest.

Where else can you stay overnight in teepees with vintage cars parked outside?  The motel’s name, we learned, is incorrect – these are teepees, not wigwams.

The interior of each teepee is clean, but small, and sparsely decorated with Navajo craftwork.

In 1988 the motel court was restored and reopened, with the important addition of cable TV and air conditioning.

As we drove through the Painted Desert, we felt like Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and his crazy sidekick Neal Cassady. Their journey across Route 66 through the desert was the inspiration for the novel “On the Road.”  What a magical place!

We stopped at the Painted Desert Inn, built in the 1920’s, near the entrance to Petrified Forest National Park. Its adobe walls blend seamlessly into the desert colors. Originally on RTE 66, it ceased to operate as an inn in 1963 and functions today as a visitor’s center and small museum.

Its vintage soda shop has an authentic menu posted on the wall.  The big ticket item: a banana split, costing 30 cents.

The Hopi murals, glass skylight and half timber ceiling make up the center lobby.

We continued our drive through Petrified Forest National Park and stopped to look at some calendric petroglyphs . . .

. . . and the remains of some Puebloan homes of prehistoric, pre-Hopi tribe people, circa 1250-1380 CE.

We then entered Blue Mesa, a vibrant badlands housing petrified wood in its canyons.

A huge piece of petrified wood, the ancient remains of prehistoric forests, rests at the bottom of the photo in the middle.

Clusters of petrified wood chunks nestle in nooks in the canyon.

A close up of petrified wood, now turned to stone

Contrasting the reddish/pink tones of the Painted Desert, these mesas are bluish in tone.

Old RTE 66 runs through Petrified Forest National Park. Familiar sights on the old road were broken down jalopies, abandoned by Dust Bowl refugees and other adventurous motorists.  The park has left one old car as a reminder of the unforgiveness of these badlands.  Steinbeck devoted an entire chapter to the road and its harshness in “The Grapes of Wrath”:

“In the day ancient leaky radiators sent up columns of steam, loose connecting-rods hammered and pounded. And the men driving the trucks and the overloaded cars listened apprehensively. . . . Cars limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling.  Too hot, lose connections, loose bearings, rattling bodies. . . .Two hundred and fifty thousand people over the road. Fifty thousand old cars—wounded, steam. Wrecks along the road abandoned.  Well, what happened to them?  What happened to the folks in that car?”  (Chapter 12)

This Cadillac grill is a monument to the abandoned cars on RTE 66.

We saw only half of the park because of its enormous size.  We still had a long drive ahead of us to Albuquerque, NM. We will definitely return next year to see the rest.