Skip to main content

Albuquerque, NM to Gallup, NM

Image
By

This morning we left Albuquerque

Crossroads with Rte 66 going in all directions. 

and headed west towards Gallup. Our drive twisted and turned across colourful landscapes with towering bluffs and through quiet villages and ghost towns before reaching the old, tarnished mining town of Grants.


We drove along between the railroad and the Interstate for many miles. We had never seen freight trains so long - 120 wagons on some of them!



We reached Gallup and checked into our hotel - El Rancho Hotel which was built in the 1930s and has been lovingly restored. Many film stars stayed there while filming in the countryside and the rooms in the old wing are all named after he stars who stayed in them - John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Katharine Hepburn etc. We stayed in the James Cagney room.



Comments

  1. Anonymous3 October 2015 at 04:59

    Hi Sylvia, greetings from the 'ladies who lunch'. I am really enjoying the blog and very impressed with the photography and the driving of course !! Hope the rest of the trip goes well, see you soon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown3 October 2015 at 12:48

    Therese, Love the landscape and the blue skies. I can almost hear the country music!! The hotel is quite something. We have seen so much TV and old Westerns that the places almost look familiar, it must be hard to believe that you are actually there!
    Rosaleen

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holbrook, AZ to Peach Springs, AZ

By
We left Holbrook in bright sunshine and continued our drive along Rte 66 which once again had us driving on the Interstate at times. Our first stop was in Winslow made famous when The Eagles recorded "Take It Easy" whose second verse starts with "Standin' on a corner in Winslow Arizona". We then drove on to Flagstaff but didn't stop in the city. Flagstaff has a beautiful forested location high up on the Colorado Plateau and it was a change to be driving on roads lined with tall ponderosa pine trees. We had a picnic lunch off the beaten track in Buckskinner Park, Williams, AZ. We followed a dirt trail to the picnic area which really tested our car's tyres.  They survived, thankfully. We soon found ourselves in Seligman (pronounced Sligman), a sleepy town which maintains a lot of its historic character together with a few unexpected twists - eg Santa in a Chevvy outside the wacky Snow Cap Drive-in. Our destination for the night was th...
2 comments
Read more

Amarillo, Texas to Tucumcari, New Mexico

By
We packed up after breakfast and continued our drive through Texas. Our first stop was at a ranch. Usually one expects to see horses at a ranch but this one was home to a row of half-buried Cadillacs! It was the idea of a controversial millionaire, Stanley Marsh from Amarillo. He said he created it as tribute to the golden age of car travel!! Visitors are encouraged to leave their mark by spray painting their names, comments etc. on the cars. We soon reached Vega, another small town with lots of Rte 66 treasures including a restored 1920s Magnolia gas station and the Milburn-Price Museum in what was previously the town bus station. Miss Karen, the owner told us lots of interesting stories about the museum pieces which were all donated by local families. Outside the museum there was a beautifully restored 1923 Model T Ford. We reached Adrian, TX which marks the mid point of the Route - 1139 miles east to Chicago and 1139 miles to Santa Monica, Los Angel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Peach Springs,AZ to Las Vegas, NV

By
It was dull and overcast when we got up this morning and the weather got worse as time went on. It rained quite heavily as we drove north towards the Hoover Dam. We later discovered that there was a number of weather alerts for flash floods issued for the area we were driving through that morning. The Hoover Dam is located between Arizona and Nevada on the Colorado River. Lake Mead, which formed behind the dam is the largest man-made reservoir in the Western Hemisphere. We accessed the Dam by driving over the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge ( see photo below) whose total length is 1905 feet, making it the longest single-arch bridge in North America. At 880 feet over the Colorado River it is the 2nd highest bridge in the USA and the highest concrete-arch bridge anywhere. During the Depression in the 1930s, thousands of men and their families came to Black Canyon to build the Hoover Dam and tame the Colorado River. It took them less than 5 years in this harsh and barre...
Post a Comment
Read more