Petrified Forest, Painted Dessert & El Ranch (Sat. July 24)

After a really crazy day yesterday, squeezing in so many places today we took it much easier. After a good nights sleep in our wigwam we headed a couple of blocks down the road for breakfast at Joe and Aggie’s Café. For the first time on the trip I was asked that typical southwestern question “Red or Green”. In the southwest many restaurants serve Mexican food and they top it with red or green chili sauce. I was ordering an egg dish that came with chili sauce. Green is chunky, red is not. Depending on who made the chili sauce it can be anywhere from very hot to very mild. . The waitress insisted it was not too hot so I ordered up green. After our orders were in we were reading the history of the restaurant on the menu and there was a story about a northern who came into the café bragging that he could eat anyone’s chili sauce but after eating Joe and Aggie’s he admitted he had found one too hot for him. Needless to say I got a bit nervous about my order and called over the waitress who assured me I would be fine. I was.

As we finished up our breakfast I overheard a gentleman behind us talking about going to “that John Wayne place”. Pedro is so crazy about John Wayne that I had to ask the guy what he was talking about. He said that he had spent four hours the day before on the ranch that used to be John Wayne’s (it is now part of an Indian reservation) talking to the guy who was John Wayne’s pilot (the Indians let him stay in the house John Wayne lived in). It would have been so cool to take Pedro there but it was at least an hour south of where we were, in the wrong direction from where we were headed. But the gentleman did give me a web address and the e-mail of the pilot and said he loves talking to people about John Wayne. Pedro was very excited to know he could contact this guy.

While I was talking to him the boys were talking to one of the women working at the restaurant. They think she was the one who owns the restaurant. She told them how their restaurant was one of the restaurants they used for ideas when creating Cars. She told the boys to watch the bonus features of Cars and they would see a picture of her, her husband and Joe Lasseter the director of Cars. It was exciting for the boys to actually talk to someone who was involved in some way in the film.

We left Joe and Aggie’s. Headed to the Chamber of Commerce for the boys to collect the final stamp they needed in their Arizona Route 66 passbook and then headed on our way.

Holbrook is very typical of many of the cities along Route 66 we have seen. There are many old motels and restaurants. Some still making it and some are closed and boarded up. There are old closed down gas stations and either empty houses or run down houses that Indians or Mexicans live in. Some of the towns seem pretty poor. Most of them have really nice murals painted on walls of some of the buildings along the route. We have some great pictures of some of these murals.

From Holbrook we headed to the Petrified Forest and Painted Dessert. It is amazing to see petrified wood. For those of you who do not really know what it is (I sure didn’t) it is logs that were around before dinosaurs that have turned to stone because of a process where they were covered up with either lava from a volcano or a similar substance and then over the years minerals got into the wood and basically replaced the wood a little bit at a time until it became stone. You see the logs from a few feet away and they look like normal wood but when you get close and see them and touch them you realize they really are stone. The Painted Dessert is on the northern end of the Petrified Forest. You can’t really see one without seeing the other. Though we have seen a lot of great colors in the Badlands and the Grand Canyon they didn’t compare with the Painted Desserts. The colors were remarkable. I wish we could have been there at sunset. They say that is the best time to see the colors.

Other than the petrified wood in the forest there are also petroglyphs and the remnants of an old Indian pueblo in the park. Both were pretty interesting to see particularly the petro??? There was also an unexpected display honoring Route 66. The Petrified Forest was the only National Park that Route 66 went through. Though the road was eventually realigned and no longer goes through the park.
From the dessert we headed on through a few more small Arizona town and then into New Mexico and immediately lost an hour as we crossed the time zone. In New Mexico the first town we stopped at was Gallup. We decided to stop and eat at El Ranch Hotel, Motel & Restaurant. Many movie stars stayed at this hotel in the past when filming was taking place here (it used to be a mini Hollywood). In honor of this every item on the menu is named for someone from films (Ronald Regan, John Wayne . . ) as well as every room in the hotel is named after a star. The first and second floors are totally covered in pictures of old movies and autographed pictures of the movie starts who stayed here. It was really fun to go around and look at all the pictures and see who we recognized. I recognized some stars, Conor and Colin recognized nobody. But Pedro was a different story. In Spain they like to watch old Western films and he knew quite a few of the stars without even reading the name on the picture. It was definitely fun for him.

As we left the hotel the decision was do we go on for a few more hours or just call it quits for the day. It was so late because of the time change and Conor had a bad headache so we decided to just stop for the day. Get the laundry done and hopefully catch up on the blog and school work. Well the laundry got done but before we could get much done on the internet a huge storm blew through and internet and cell phones went down completely in all of Gallup. So much for getting caught up!!!