Day 74:
Up and away from Santa Fe, bound for Arizona somewhere. Heading west, now we are feeling the pull as we are homeward bound. Happy with ourselves and the trip but aware that this phase is nearing completion and we are looking forward for the next part, home for Christmas with friends and family, then off again.
Intended a relaxed driving day, not a lot of sight-seeing beyond looking at the high desert as we crossed New Mexico and into Arizona. We were told by people in Santa Fe that Albuquerque 'is just a big American city, traffic and new buildings'. Perhaps untrue, and maybe some inter-city jealousy, but we took it seriously and just passed from I 25 over onto I 40 seamlessly in the middle of the city. Not hard to do at 8:30am on a Sunday morning. So we don't know any more about Albuquerque than we started with, perhaps our loss but Jan's guidebooks didn't give us a compelling reason to get off the Interstate either. One thing we noticed was the pollution, however, easy to see as we passed from the high plateau of Santa Fe downhill into Albuquerque, the grey-blue haze rising from the valley-bottom to partway up the mountains.
Now west as we pass onto I 40, the old 'historic Route 66' as the T-shirts all say. Serious desert now, jagged mountains in the distance and flat, barren, sand and rocks and small stunted bushes from the middle distance in toward the road. No heat to speak of, it being a mid-November early-morning, but brilliant sunshine in a sky ranging from dark blue to lighter in the glare of the sun. Up one range of mountains, down, into and across the valley, up again, across the pass, down again into a valley, and repeat. On a long ribbon of road stretching to the horizon, endless. We sort of hoped to avoid the big trucks but they were out in force. Speed limit of 75mph, we cruised at a steady 115 kph (between 70 and 75mph), 3000 rpm, but they just blew by us. Some of the car traffic was well over 100mph, no doubt, they were flying. Cops all at church I guess, we saw not one all day. The four lane highway was not congested however, just busy, so we held up nobody and were relaxed and safe all day. Even when busy, the roads out west are nothing compared to the beltways of the eastern seaboard. We see some strange sights here on the desert, like the lady (?) with the leather jacket and chaps and pink helmet with the pink mohawk hair, on the three-wheeler. I guess the sun bakes the brain after a while.
Passed through Winslow, Arizona, on our way to Flagstaff for the night. Remember the song with the lines 'Standin on a corner in Winslow Arizona, such a fine sight to see. Its a girl, my lord, in a flatbed ford, slowin down to take a look at me.'. It had been a full day and we were ready to stop, so gas on the corner in Winslow seemed a good thing to do. As we were leaving we saw a sign saying '15 miles to the Meteor Crater', and we remembered an old movie, Starman, with Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, where the final scenes were shot at the crater, and we said what the hell and headed there. Sure enough, 15 miles down I 40 and 6 miles south was the crater. You can't see the crater, driving up. It is a crater, after all, and it is up on a plateau as well. The meteor pilot didn't pick his crash-landing site very well. But once you get up to it, pay your fee, and get past the interpretive center, the crater is stunning. It is a giant bowl-shaped hole, symetrical, with a perfectly rounded bottom and a lip of debris at the top. Most of the material from the hole was flung upward to the atmosphere, or vaporized in the blast, very little scattered around the edges. Jan and I wandered about, took pictures, and thoroughly enjoyed the material in the interpretive center. It was late, almost twilight, as we left, and the low sun angle danced the car's shadow beside the road, across the rocks and bushes and over the flats.
Finally into Flagstaff for the night, in the dark, catching a mile of stop-and-go truck traffic in a one-lane section of I 40 just before we got to the motel.
