Miles driven: 438.3
I managed to drive almost twice as far today in the rental car as I normally did in the van. Being able to go more than 65 mph was a big help with that. I’m also loving how cheap it is to fill up the rental car, as it only has a 10 gallon tank and gets 350 miles per tank. By comparison, the van had a 31 gallon tank and maybe got about 240 miles per tank. It’s insane how different those numbers are.
Since I’m on a more limited timeline now, I’m trying to stop less and focus on the places I know I want to see. The first stop today was at the well known Jack Rabbit Trading Post near Joseph City, Arizona.
I pushed on to Holbrook to stop at the Wigwam Motel, which is probably the stop I looked forward to the most in Arizona. I think the rooms are insanely cool and they have an awesome display of old cars around the parking lot. There’s another one back in San Bernardino, California, and I think there is (or was) a third one somewhere else, but the one in Arizona is the one I wanted to see. The others are just imitations.
Most of New Mexico’s Route 66 is basically the “frontage” road that parallels I-40. Not a lot of excitement along the way. There were plenty of cool signs in some of the towns, but the only one I stopped and took a picture of was Grants Cafe in the town of Grants. It’s just a sign in a parking lot; there’s no building associated with it that I could tell.
I got slowed down by traffic going through Albuquerque and then hammered by a hail storm shortly after passing through Moriarty. I had to pull off the highway because it got to the point that it was impossible to even see the road anymore. It reminded me of the white-out rains during summer in Pensacola, except this was hail/rain mixed. Eventually it let up enough that I pushed on to end the day in Santa Rosa, staying at an old school Route 66 motel that has metal keys on plastic tags for the rooms. It’s, like, legit.