Santa Fe

Posted on September 13, 2012 by setiawanphoto

Santa Fe is the capital city of the state of New Mexico. The city is rich in history, as it started as an ancient settlement of the Pueblo Indians as early as 1050 and 1150, then becoming a Spanish colony around the 1600s, being part of the Republic of Texas briefly in the early 1800s, and then from 1912 becoming the state capital when New Mexico became a US state. The city is quite unique as they impose an ordinance as part of city planning that requires any building built in the city to follow a distinct architectural style (the Spanish revival style). The city also attracts artists given the beauty of the landscape of the surrounding mountains and deserts. You can find a large number of galleries within the city center. In mid 20th century, with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory opened up nearby, there is also significant scientific community residing in the area.

The early alignment of Route 66 (before 1937) went through Santa Fe, so today most guide for Route 66 travel would include the city in its route coverage. When we’re planning for our trip, we thought of taking a shortcut and continuing on Interstate 40 east bound and not going out of the way (north of Albuquerque) to Santa Fe. However, we thought it’s such a rich place historically and culturally to miss that it’s worth taking the extra time for the detour to at least spend a few hours there. To ensure we could still stay within our trip timeline, we decided to leave our rest stop the night before at a very early hour. Combined with our late arrival the night before, this meant we only had less than four hours of sleep before having to continue again. My brother and I took turn in driving and getting a bit more sleep in the car during the drive from Holbrook, AZ, to Santa Fe.

We arrived at Santa Fe around 9 am, just in time to find parking and head to one of the museums in town to spend a couple of hours checking it out. My brother is a visual artist, and if you think of visual arts and Santa Fe, the name that likely would come up is Georgia O’Keeffe, a famous American painter who spent significant time of her life near Santa Fe. There is a museum featuring her works in Santa Fe, so we decided to go there for our stop in the city.

We also spent some time walking around the downtown area of Santa Fe. It was early October time, so we could already feel the autumn weather with the crisp air and some of the aspen trees around already turning yellow. As we walked through a park in downtown Santa Fe, I noticed a gentleman (looked like either he was of Native American or Spanish descent) with his accoustic guitar playing some beautiful tunes at the park. I took the picture below, which I think is a good representation of Santa Fe with its arts, history, and culture.

Lodging on the Road

Posted on September 12, 2012 by setiawanphoto

When traveling long distance on the road, you need to also consider where you will be spending the nights along the way. The most important consideration is that despite of the desire to get to the destination in the shortest amount possible, your body and mind (especially if you’re the driver) will need some time to rest after several hours sitting in the car and concentrating on the road). Otherwise, it may cause some risk of endangering yourself and others on the road — you need to know your physical limits and ensure that you don’t push it beyond.

In several multi-day, multi-destination road trips I had done in the past, typically I considered three options for lodging.

First option is no lodging at all, but stopping at rest areas whenever I feel like I need some break. This is a good practice to do even when you’re only doing a day trip, but I would consider this option only if I’m driving with an alternate driver who can take turn with me in driving / resting, thus we’re not losing time from the rest stop but still keeping the drive safe. And I think the longest stretch I had done such segment of a trip was less than 24 hours, also knowing that at the end of that stretch I would have an opportunity to rest (e.g., a cozy room waiting somewhere to rest and freshen up).

Second option is to plan the route so you would end up reaching a particular destination along your trip where you can make a prior arrangement for a place to stay overnight. That could be staying at the home of someone who I know, or staying at an accomodation at the particular location. This is my preferred choice, as personally I’m a planner and I would like to have things prepared or planned ahead of time and I know exactly how to structure my schedule.

The third option is to just ‘wing it’ and drive as far as you’re comfortable of going, and find lodging option wherever and whenever you get to your ‘end of day.’ I’m least comfortable doing this as it goes against my nature of having the trip structured/planned, but sometimes you may not have a choice if your trip is happening in the last minute or you can’t easily planned out the trip due to whatever reasons.

During the coast-to-coast road trip with my brother, we had about five days to complete around 3,300 miles. That means on average around 660 miles, which means roughly around 10 hours of driving a day. Plus we’re driving east bound, meaning that we would be ‘losing’ time as we go across timezone boundaries. So we did rough planning as we mapped our journey. We knew we would be passing Chicago area during the trip, and my brother’s old college friend lived in the suburb of Chicago. And then between Chicago and New York City, we thought we could take a little longer trip through Washington, DC, area, which added several hours to the driving time, but that would mean we can spend one night at my home.

That left us with figuring out where to stop for the first two nights on the road between Santa Monica and Chicago. In the end, we decided to make get into the spirit of the Mother Road travel, and purposefully not planning where we would be staying for those two nights. We thought we would just push as far as we could on the first day, hopefully to get somewhere close to Arizona-New Mexico border, and then on the second day, do another push to get to somewhere in Oklahoma that would be roughly covering another third of the distance towards Chicago.

For the first night, we had one place in mind as a place to stay that we thought would be an experience in itself. In Holbrook, AZ, there is a family-owned motel called the Wigwam Motel that is unique because each of the motel rooms is inside a wigwam-shaped structure. The place had been around since the heyday of Motel 66, and it was an inspiration for the wigwam-shaped motel in the animated movie Cars. A few hours before we reached Holbrook, I called in the Motel to see if they had any room available for the night. Unfortunately we were not the only one with such idea, and the place was sold out for the night. So as an alternative, we did stay at a motel in Holbrook, but it was one of the more modern alternatives, a motel in a chain called Travelodge. We only stayed for a few hours of sleep and to take showers, so it wasn’t really much to remember other than it served the purpose.

In the morning, as we continued our drive east bound, we stopped in Gallup, NM, for breakfast. We passed another landmark on Route 66, a hotel called the El Rancho Hotel. We didn’t stop and only took a photo of the hotel from the road, but this is one place that should be considered if you’re looking for an accomodation around there. The hotel was built by someone connected to the movie industry to provide comfortable lodging fit for movie stars, as between then 1940s and 1960s Holywood filmmakers would shoot the Old Western movies in the area that is about as real western atmosphere as it gets. There is the desert, the nearby Native American reservations, and the other worldly vistas of red rock mesas. It’s pretty cool to think that the hotel’s past guests included names like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Katherine Hepburn, and Kirk Douglas.

So there it was, the experience of finding lodging options along the western part of Route 66. The photo below was the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, NM. We did drive past the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, AZ, but it was dark in the middle of the night, so we didn’t have any photo of the unique motel.

Birthplace of Historic Route 66

Posted on September 11, 2012 by setiawanphoto

Seligman is another town on the Arizona segment of Route 66 that was impacted when the Mother Road was decommissioned and traffic went to the nearby Interstate 40 instead. Even though it is located pretty close to an exit on the Interstate highway, most travelers would drive past the town unless they needed to stop for rest stop, and the town became just like any other exits on the long Interstate highway where the focus for the travelers was to get to the destination in the shortest amount of time possible.

In 1987, a longtime Seligman resident, Angel Delgadillo, started a petition with several other Route 66 enthusiasts requesting the state of Arizona to designate the segment of the road between Seligman and Kingman as a historic route. The Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona was founded with the goal to preserve the rich history and cultural influence of the road and where travelers could still experience what it was like to drive on this route as it was in the past. By 1990, similar organizations were started in the other states on Route 66, and now all segments of Route 66 in Arizona and significant portions in the other states are marked as Historic Route thanks to the grass root efforts from these local activists. In many places, you can meet people like Mr. Delgadillo who are happy to share their knowledge or even life experience meeting travelers who passed by the Mother Road. They could be attraction in themselves in addition to visiting the landmarks.

When we reached Kingman after the drive through the old Route 66 from Needles, CA, it’s already dark and we still had quite some distance to cover for the day. So we decided to get back on the Interstate to go at higher speed. It was close to dinner time, so we decided to stop in Seligman, the next town we knew of from the guidebooks that seemed to have good dining options.

We decided to eat at a place that had curious name, the Road Kill Cafe. We wondered if they actually indeed served road kills (animals that got killed on the road accidentally). It turned out that they simply named their dishes as if they were prepared with road kill meats; I’m not sure if they would be allowed by law to serve those for health reasons. The place itself had character with its quirky decorations, definitely making it a unique place to stop (certainly better than eating at generic fast food chain restaurant).

It turned out that there were some interesting places in Seligman where you could meet locals like Mr. Delgadillo who could tell you stories about the Mother Road. However, it was already pretty late on a Sunday night by the time we were done with dinner, and we still had at least three hours of driving that we wanted to cover for the day. So we stopped by at a nearby gift shop to take photo from the outside while we filled up our gas tank, and then we continued on our road trip. You can see on the photo below that they definitely had quite a selection of Route 66 memorabilias there.

Rest Stop in the Desert

Posted on September 10, 2012 by setiawanphoto

When you’re driving from the east on the Arizona segment of Route 66 between Kingman and Oatman, the highway transitioned from a drive on a flat plains of the Sacramanto Valley from Kingman to a treacherous climb up through the Black Mountains near Oatman. In the old days, this was quite intimidating for the travelers as they would have to go through a narrow road with steep grades and hairpin turns. Some people even hired locals to drive their cars through these area or even tow their cars to the summit.

Just before you start the climb, there was rest stop called Cool Springs that was was opened up as a place for the travelers to check their cars or fueled up before they tackle the challenging terrain, or for those who traveled from the west, a stop to rest after going through mountainous road. A family from Indiana opened and ran the litte shop since the 1930s and handed the property over through a couple generations through the heyday of Route 66 in the 1950s. By early 1960s, however, the new alignment of Route 66 that bypassed the segment through the Black Mountains, and then later the development of the Interstate highway ended up killing the traffic through this road. And finally in the mid 1960s, a fire burned down the rest stop building reducing it to ruins.

In 1997, an Illinois man named Ned Leuchtner passed the area and was very impressed with the landscape around it. He wondered what ever happened to the place when he saw the ruins of Cool Springs, and through the help of a local real estate broker, he was able to find the owner of the property and learned the story about the place. After three years persuading the old owner to sell the property to him, he finally was able to get the property with his promise to rebuild the place. From 2001 to 2004, Ned worked to restore Cool Springs to what it was like back in its heyday, and in 2005, the restoration was complete and the place was reopened as a museum. Now travelers can see what the place looked like decades ago when this was an important stop on the old route to the West.

From Oatman, we traveled east through the Black Mountain towards Cool Springs. So in our case, we went through the Black Mountains route in reverse and it was mostly negotiating steep downhill drive through narrow roads with hairpin turns that definitely lived up to the description we read in guidebooks. Fortunately we managed to go through this segment when it’s still light outside. It was quite beautiful as well to see the sun setting in the distance as we drove through the mountainous region.

When we reached Cool Springs, the place was not open and we were pretty much by ourselves. We stopped there to admire the scenery and took some photos of the old rest stop, the restored gas pump, and some architectural details on the facility that showed the quality of the restoration that was done at the place. There was also an old Ford pick up truck parked outside the building, adding an authentic feel to the scenery. Unfortunately we didn’t get to meet some of the folks that made this happen, but it was a cool stop nevertheless.

The photo below was taken from across the street of the building. You could see the picturesque mountains behind the building.

Burros at the Old West Town

Posted on September 9, 2012 by setiawanphoto

Oatman is a small town in the Black Mountains in northwestern Arizona. It is located in a remote area, but the town has quite an illustrious history.

It started as a tent camp soon after two prospectors found $10 million worth of gold in nearby area in 1915. The town was named after Olive Oatman, an Illinois-native woman who was abducted by an Indian tribe, kept as a slave, traded to another Indian tribe, and later released near the site of the town of Oatman.

Later on, the Oatman Hotel in town became famous as the place where famous Holywood actors Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon after getting married in nearby Kingman, AZ. Supposedly Clark Gable enjoyed spending time playing poker with the miners in the town.

During the heyday of Route 66, the town became a tourist attraction because of its colorful history and its location that is right on the old Route 66. After the Interstate 40 was opened and it bypassed the Route 66 segment in Black Mountains area, it almost became a ghost town. Today it regained its popularity as a tourist attraction as there is more interests on the Historic Route 66. There is also a nearby gambling town in Nevada that runs tourist groups to visit Oatman on regular basis.

After following the road markers on a seemingly dead end road, we started a gradual climb in the Black Mountains area. And around a bend suddenly we saw a sign to welcome us to Oatman. As we reached the main street of the town, we noticed some interesting sights. Here was an old town that looked like what you see in old wild west movie settings — except this is a real deal. That we expected already from reading about Oatman before the trip. We also saw a couple of big coach buses with tourists. I was expecting to see tourists, but not in big coach buses like that. It was quite a contrast comparing the old town with its off the beaten path road and two modern coach buses there.

The most unexpected sight was seeing several burros (wild donkeys) roaming around the town. Apparently these burros were descendants of the burros used by gold prospectors back almost a century ago. They had been released and lived in the wild, and are actually protected by law. In Oatman, they were freely roaming the main street, and apparently they knew to look for tourists with food who were willing to feed them. The local gift shop sold a bag of carrots for $1 that you could buy and feed the burros with.

My brother and I stopped and walked around the area for a little bit before continuing our journey. On some days, there were reenactment of wild west gun fight on the main street, but there was nothing going on when we were there.

The photo below was taken outside a curio shop off the main street of Oatman. You can see a couple of local shopkeepers with the burros in front of their shop.