Tag Archives: route 66

Lodging on the Road

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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.

El Rancho Hotel

Birthplace of Historic Route 66

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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.

Route 66 gift shop

Rest Stop in the Desert

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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.

Cool Springs

Off the Beaten Path

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After a few hours traveling on the Interstate highway from Los Angeles, we reached Needles, CA, the last exit on I-40 east bound before entering Arizona. Most people would pass this exit unless they need to stop for fuel at the gas station nearby. We exited the Interstate highway here because we wanted to take an alternate, ‘scenic route,’ the old Route 66 between Needles and Kingman, AZ.

We decided to explore this segment of Route 66 because it’s among the best representation of old, historic route that ended up getting bypassed and replaced by the modern Interstate Highway. The old route goes through a winding road on the Black Mountains area. It’s scenic, but not the fastest way. The Interstate highway cuts through another part of the mountainous region and provide a shorter and faster route for those who need to speed up to get through the area.

Another reason why this old route was interesting to us is because it passes two points of interests, a ghost town called Oatman, and a restored rest stop called Cool Springs. Again, more historical look at what Route 66 looked like back in its heyday.

After we passed the town of Needles and entered into the state of Arizona, we followed the road sign to Oatman. Gradually we went from driving on a busy four-lane highway to a smaller two-lane road that led towards the mountain. It felt like we’re alone in the middle of nowhere and heading to a dead end, until we saw a sign indicating we’re on the historic stretch of Route 66 and we’re only few miles away from Oatman.

The photo below was taken as we’re getting closer to Oatman. You can see that the road is not much traveled anymore, and there is the historic Route 66 marker.

Off the beaten path

Life is a Highway

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We started our coast-to-coast road trip with a visit to the Santa Monica Pier to find the official west end of Route 66. We found the official plaque that marked the end of the road. The actual Route 66 itself now only exists in segments, so we used a couple of books on Route 66 that traces the route along today’s modern highway.

Before leaving LA area, we made a couple of stops, first in Beverly Hills area to attend a service at Mosaic, then on the way out of suburban LA we stopped in Monterey Park to eat lunch in the Chinatown area. After lunch, we’re off for our first day of the trip.

We had roughly five days to complete the journey from Santa Monica to New York City. So, on the first day, our target was to reach somewhere in northeastern part of Arizona. Along the way, we wanted to take a segment of the old Route 66 in Arizona that according to the books on Route 66 still provided good representation of what it was like in the heyday of the Mother Road. Since the route supposedly went through pretty steep incline/decline grade on the mountains, we thought it would be a good idea to try reaching the area before it gets dark.

The road we took that afternoon consisted several segment that were pretty much a straight shot drive. It could get boring after a while and I found myself keeping myself alert by listening to songs, observing what’s around, or thinking about something. The first part of the trip in the eastern California towards Arizona reminded me to the song Life is a Highway by Rascal Flatts. The first part of the song went like this:

Well, life’s like a road that you travel on
There’s one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind

I did think about the lyrics of the song above and how that might be a good metaphor of what life is like as the song suggests. I think there is some good pictures there.

When driving on a highway, at times we go through straight segment where we can go fast, and then we encounter curves where we have to slow down. Life also goes like that. At times, things go well and we can progress fast. At other times, we face obstacles or challenges and we have to slow down the progress or even take a step back.

On the highway, we might pass other automobiles with people going to different destinations and with different reasons of traveling — some for leisure, others for business, and yet others for other different reasons. Some are still in the early part of their journey, others are already close to the end of theirs. Similarly, with life we encounter different people who are in the middle of life journey to achieve certain goals (studying at school, building a career, starting a family, retiring, etc.), and they might be at different stages of getting towards their goal.

Another interesting metaphor is to think about how one goes through the journey. On the highway, you can focus on getting to the destination in the shortest amount of time, and end up seeing the journey as the necessary means to reach the end (the travel experience becomes a blur or, worse, an exhausting experience you just want to get over with). Or, you can also have a destination and a plan / route to get there, but consider the journey as part of the experience to remember and even look forward to. It may not get you to the end in the fastest way possible, but you enjoy the journey more.

That was essentially the theme of Pixar’s animated movie Cars. As I did my planning before the trip, I came to learn that the inspiration for the movie was Route 66, its history, and many people who live along the road. Behind the great animation and funny characters there was a great story and message about cherishing life’s journey and the people you share it with.

I took the photo below during the drive on one of those long, straight stretches on I-40 eastbound. You can see the straight road, and other cars around us. One car in front of us had a U-Haul trailer on the back; it’s likely someone who was in the middle of a journey to move to new place, just like my brother.

Life is a highway