Ever since I heard the Eagles sing about "standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona", I've wondered just what that looked like. This is the welcome sign at the entrance to town. Winslow is a small town in northern Arizona that was one of the stops on fabled Route 66. Today it's still a small town but it seems to be doing OK. I40 whizzes by. If you turn and do a 180 from the pic above, this is what you see.
That's Route 66 heading East. Although I didn't see any "flat bed Fords", there were several good looking diners and various businesses. The town didn't have the forlorn look that Grants, NM did. It was not unduly decorated with fast food franchises and seemed to have profited from being included in the song. I think I read somewhere that the composer of the song had never actually been in Winslow and just liked the sound of the phrase. Here's a look at dead center of Winslow, featuring the lone stoplight in town.
This was shot at about 10:00 on a Saturday morning. You can see the level of activity. All in all, a decent little town. Not as charismatic as some of the other Route 66 stops but nice nonetheless.
After we left Oklahoma a few days ago, we crossed over into the Texas panhandle. The day was hot and the motorhome was getting hot as well, so I stopped at a very nice county run rest area to cool off. I went to go inside to see what they had and as I approached the front door, I saw hundreds of moths flying about and crawling on the front of the building. It was impossible to open the door without admitting a dozen into the building. When I got inside, of course there were dozens and dozens of them flying around. I spent a few minutes at the neat exhibits and read about the life of a trail cook and his chuckwagon. When I went back out, the moths were flying around the motorhome, so of course, some got inside. Well, there have been moths flying around at every rest stop since. They are about an inch long with gray-brown wings. I don't know what kind they are, I just want them gone. I don't see them now that we are in Arizona but I have a resident population to deal with. I got three of them last night and one more this morning. They hide pretty well in the daytime and then come out at night to dive bomb us. War is declared!
Another one of the striking sights along the way has been the trains. I've seen trains all my life. I hear the horn, the gate comes down and around the bend comes the train. I sit at the crossing and count the cars, a habit I picked up long ago. Well, along the way West, there has been one main route followed by the Indians and the settlers and the railroad and the road builders. So all along the highway, the train runs parallel.
I tried to grab a quick shot of the tracks once when we passed over them. Not good but you get the idea. It's usually two sets of rails, sometimes just one and sometimes several, especially near the towns like Gallop. NM, which has a service facility. The line is the BNSF, now an internationally owned mix of many of the old lines like the Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe and others. What's striking is the number of trains we see as we drive along. They have three or four engines pulling them and look to be a mile long. Once I saw one much longer than that with three engines in front pulling and two in back pushing. These trains are on the same track and separated by time. We saw one about once every half hour. Sometimes they were stopped, waiting for some switching action down the line, but most were moving. And due to the nature of the land, most of the time you could see the whole train at once moving through the desert. The engines have three headlights so you can see this triangle of light, one on top, two on the bottom, coming from way off. The numbers of trains was very impressive. I suppose more freight moves by truck but the trains are holding up their end, too.
We arrived in Prescott yesterday about 1:00 and followed our hosts to the local rodeo arena where they were finishing up a 4H stock show and sale. We spent the afternoon watching the stock auction and then met a group for a family dinner before things broke up. Now we're settled in at my cousin's and looking forward to some rest. And then some shopping and some sight seeing. I'll keep you posted.
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