US-66

Not too far north of Sin City our rental SUV saw thirty-six thousand miles on the odometer.

1) If you are ever in Flagstaff, Arizona at breakfast time do yourself a favor and avoid the draw of the chain restaurants and head over to Mike and Rondas The Place. Great service, excellent & plentiful food that will probably cost less than those other pedestrian places.

2) The city that built the Hoover Dam where we had lunch at a chain we had never seen before, Capriotti’s. Man where has this place been all our lives? The Cheesesteak sandwiches were great. The photo is of a monument to the hard hat that was first required to be worn during the building of the Hoover (Boulder) Dam where the motto was “Safety First.”

3) About 20 miles south of our destination for the day was Big Dune, a 300 foot high collection of sand dunes. We thought, let’s check it out. After a couple miles down a paved road, we turned onto a sandy road. We never got any closer than this because we turned around when we started slipping and didn’t want to get stuck.

After 3 fun days of helping a friend set up in her new house in Santa Fe, we are headed home. We drove several miles of the Mother Road, AKA Old US-66, which made a nice change of pace from slotting in amongst the 60 million semis that crowd along I-40. This was taken in Holbrook, AZ as we passed through. Later, when we passed through Winslow I thought about stopping and taking a picture on a random street corner, but by then all we could think about was getting to our hotel in Flagstaff.