Route 66 - Day 10, Flagstaff, AZ to Needles, CA

[Martin Hash]

Arizona has pine trees, not like the evergreens we have back home, but homey & familiar none-the-less. When my wife, Gwynne, and I were kids, Smokey the Bear was a big thing, but he seems to have lost his supremacy in the social consciousness, so it was with great pleasure to see so much of Smokey in Williams, Arizona, in the middle of the Kaibab National Forest. I bought so much Smokey-themed hat, pins, magnets & whatnot that the cashier gave us two 75th Anniversary Smokey-the-Bear coffee mugs.

Gwynne With Smokey.jpg

It’d been a long time since I had a buffalo-meat burger. I remembered liking it, and I remembered correctly because Gwynne & I ordered one at the famous Roadkill “You Kill It, We Grill It” Cafe in Seligman. If that weren’t enough, there was a moose head, buzzard skeleton, stuffed elk, wolf, Bear & raccoon, and the 1860 jail; supposedly James Younger was one of its occupants.

Roadkill Cafe.JPG

We traveled the longest intact section of Route 66, 137 miles, all in Arizona and nary another car on the 2-lane road. There was nothing but scrub-grass desert for as far as we could see to both sides of us, so we just cruised along, the setting sun lighting up the windshield, and listening to 50s music on AM radio. The only stop we made was to see the World’s Largest Dinosaur Saddle

Largest Dinosaur Saddle.JPG