Thursday, June 23rd we woke up to a fairly cool morning for a change, somewhere in the 60's. About noon we drove South from Flagstaff, headed back to Sedona and lunch with some friends, Ed and Pat Ruese. Ed and Pat had been full-time RVers for over 25 years. We met them at our second FMCA rally when Pat
was President of the 100%ers Chapter and I was drafted as Vice President. A couple of years later Ed and Pat decided it was time to quit the full time lifestyle and they bought a house in Clarkdale, Arizona, the neighboring town to Cottonwood. We had contacted them while we were in Camp Verde to try to get together, but they were traveling and would not be back until the day we were leaving for Flagstaff. However, since Flagstaff is only about 30 miles from Sedona, and Clarkdale is about the same, we made plans to meet there for lunch. We had lunch at the Oak Creek Brewery and Grill, the same place we went with the Cohen’s last week. The food is really good and Pat suggested it as well. We had a great lunch and spent a couple of hours talking and catching up. We had last seen Ed and Pat up in Oregon in August of last year at the 3Ts rally. They seem to really enjoy being house bound again. They still have their motorhome and travel some, in fact, they are heading to the FMCA rally in Wisconsin this summer. It was nice seeing them again, they are very nice and interesting people.
After lunch we left Sedona and took the scenic route back to Flagstaff. When we came down from Flagstaff we used Highway 89A, which comes down through Oak Creek Canyon, a very nice scenic road through an area I have loved all of my life. I spent hundreds of days camping in Oak Creek Canyon during the 40 years I lived in Arizona. For our route back, however, I took an old forest road that goes Northeast out of Sedona called Schnebly Hill Road, or Forest Service Road 153.
The first mile out of Sedona is paved, after that it becomes quite rugged. The road runs 13 miles from Sedona to where it intersects I-17. I would not recommend the road unless you have a high clearance vehicle, although we did pass several regular passenger cars on our trip today. Actually, I used to drive it in a regular car when I was younger, back in the 60's and 70's. You just have to go slow. The road climbs several thousand feet and provides wonderful views of Sedona and the red rock country of Arizona that you can’t see from any other viewpoint. Check this link for a more detailed story about the road, including some history of Sedona and the area. www.desertusa.com/mag02/aug/sed1.html It took us about 90 minutes to travel the 13 miles, but it was a great trip. The first ten miles of the road out
of Sedona are also the primary route for the various Jeep tours that operated out of Sedona. One of the most famous is the Pink Jeep Tour company, which has been operating since I was in high school. We passed a dozen or so of the various Jeeps and Hummers on the road. Once we hit I-17 again we just drove North to Flagstaff. After our tour we stopped at Target in Flagstaff for a couple of things and then went back to the coach for the rest of the night.Friday, June 24th promised to be another lovely day in Flagstaff. Pretty breezy with temperatures in the high 80's. We left the coach around noon and went to a restaurant called Brandy’s Bakery and Restaurant for lunch. Brandy’s was one of the two places here in Flagstaff that have been featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-ins and Dives TV program that we watch regularly. We visited the other place, a Mexican restaurant, on our last trip. Brandy’s is in a strip mall and is not a real big place, but has a nice menu. They serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and none of the items featured on the TV show are available on the lunch menu, so we didn’t get to sample them. The lunch menu did have some excellent choices and some interesting change-ups on common sandwiches. I had a California Dip, which was a French Dip with Muenster cheese and green chilies which was excellent. Jackie had a chicken sandwich with avocado, sprouts and some other veggies that she enjoyed also. Next time we will try the dinner menu. The food was good, so if you are in the area, give it a try.
Now a little history. The area that is now Flagstaff was first settled back in 1876 by some hardy settlers arrived and liked the area. The town was really founded and started growing in 1882 with the arrival of the transcontinental railroad and Flagstaff became one of the stops along the way. Although the largest town on the railroad between Albuquerque and the West coast, a 1900 newspaper article still called the town a "third rate mining camp, with an unkempt air and high prices of available goods.” In 1894 a well known Massachusetts astronomer named Percival Lowell was searching for a site for a new telescope and settled on a peak overlooking Flagstaff. The Lowell observatory was established and is still in use today. When we were here back in March of last year we toured the observatory. It is a great side trip for anyone visiting the area. Flagstaff is also the home of Northern Arizona University, which was established in 1899 as the Northern Arizona Normal School, a teacher’s college. The campus grew and went through several name changes, including Arizona Teacher’s College of Flagstaff and Northern Arizona College at Flagstaff. In 1966 it was granted university status and renamed Northern Arizona University. Current enrollment tops 25,000 students.
Just North of Flagstaff is the Arizona Snow Bowl ski area, a big economic asset to the area. Setting at 7,000 feet, Flagstaff is subject to harsh winters with lots of snow. By the way, the name Flagstaff supposedly comes from a lodgepole pine tree that was stripped of branches by settlers in 1876 to provide a place to fly the flag on the national centennial. Other travelers talked of staying “near the flagstaff” when traveling through the area and the name stuck.
After lunch at Brandy’s we decided to go out and do some geocaching in Flagstaff and we were able to get ten finds in a couple of hours. We did have one DNF, but learned later in the day that it was gone, apparently “muggled”, or stolen in geo-speak. The 7,000 foot altitude inhibited any long hikes looking for caches. Neither of us do well with altitude, but Jackie is especially susceptible and was puffing her inhaler a couple of times during the day. After our caching we visited the Flagstaff Elks Lodge. Although we have been here several times in the past, we have never made it to the lodge for some reason. They have a very nice lodge on the North end of town, at the edge of the forest area. Very friendly folks in the bar too. They have about 600 members, which is not too bad for a city this size, similar to membership at the Indio Lodge. We had a couple drinks and got a lodge pin for our banner before heading back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Saturday, June 25th we left after lunch to drive to the Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monuments, which are about 30 miles North of Flagstaff on the road to the Grand Canyon. The two monuments are only about 15 miles apart and are connected by a side road that goes through both parks.
We first stopped at Sunset Crater and the visitor’s center. Sunset Crater is a volcanic cinder cone left over from an eruption about 1,000 years ago. The whole area of North Central Arizona is an area of heavy past volcanic activity. Because the eruption was relatively recent in geological terms, there is a lot of raw lava and cinders for miles around the mountain. We spent some time at the visitor’s center and then drove through the park. We then drove to the Wupatki National Monument
and stopped at the visitor’s center there. This is a site of a series of Indian pueblo ruins, which also date back one to two thousand yeas ago. We didn’t get out and tour the cliff house ruins because it was too hot, but we drove through and took some pictures. After our driving tour we went back into Flagstaff, stopped at Walmart and Sam’s Club, and then headed home for the night.Sunday, June 26th we packed up the coach and left Flagstaff about 10:00, heading East on I-17 to the Arizona town of Holbrook. The trip was about 89 miles and although it was warm, the road was mostly downhill or level, so there were no overheat issues. The wind was blowing pretty hard, which made driving tricky. We settled into the OK RV park in Holbrook around noon. We will be here for three days before moving on further East. Since it was very windy and hot we just stayed in the coach and relaxed the rest of the day.
Monday promised to be a hot day, so we decided that we would make it a driving tour day. We left the coach after lunch and drove 23 miles East on I-40 to the Petrified Forrest National Park. The visitors center is on the North side of the freeway at the entrance to the park, so we stopped there first. The park also includes parts of the Painted Desert.
This whole area is a part of large plateau that extends all the way up into Utah and geologically is an ancient sea bed. As the surface erodes it exposes layers of sediment, limestone and sandstone which gives the area its distinctive hues. The park extends South of the freeway and there is a 26 mile scenic road that winds South through the park. There are numerous scenic points and pullouts where you can see the thousands of chunks of petrified logs scattered around the park. We took a lot of pictures and looked at a lot of petrified wood. They obviously do not allow any collection of minerals inside the National Park, but it seems that there was plenty of petrified wood to be had on surrounding private land to supply a pretty good sized local industry in petrified wood gift shops. We did stop at one in Holbrook on the way back from the park because the RV park we are in provided a coupon for a half pound of petrified
wood free. This place, Jim Gray’s Petrified Wood store has about five acres of land which is covered in pieces of petrified wood, ranging in size from tiny chips to pieces the size of a Volkswagen. We spent some time in the store, got our free piece of rock and spent about ten bucks on some other things, including a small, cut geode that had some pretty crystal formations inside. They had some beautiful stuff, like huge coffee tables made of petrified wood, but even we could afford the thousands of dollars they cost, the weight would flatten the tires on the motorhome. Not too practical for our lifestyle.We were also able to get credit for two geocache finds today. One was a virtual cache that was actually inside of the park at one of the scenic turnouts. Virtual do not have a physical container, it is something you are supposed to find, look at, and then answer some questions about. The other was a regular cache on one of the “Welcome to Holbrook” signs in town. We were going to do a couple more, but the temperatures were in the triple digits by late afternoon, so we just went back to the coach for the rest of the evening.
Tuesday, June 28th, we left the coach before lunch to do a couple of quick geocaches before it got too hot. We only had a couple to do because we had cached here back in October and there were not that many caches in town to begin with. The first cache was right in town, a typical urban cache near an abandoned gift shop. The second cache took us North of town, near the municipal golf course, but out into the desert to a rocky gulch where there were some old Indian petroglyphs.
I had to walk about a quarter mile into the site on a trail (Jackie stayed in the car), but once I got there I found the cache without any difficulty. After caching we went to a local Mexican restaurant that one of the girls at the RV park had recommended. The place was called El Rancho and was in the middle of town on old Route 66. It seems that many of the towns along Route 66 in the Southwest had a motel and/or restaurant called El Rancho. We have seen a number of them during our travels. The food was pretty good, not outstanding, but better than average. The salsa they put on the table, however, was excellent. The restaurant was in the motel and had the usual gift shop as well as the office for the motel. Since I don’t know what the food is like at some of the other local eateries, I can’t highly recommend the place over trying something else, but it was good. After lunch we went back to the coach for the rest of the day. I did some minor repairs and other chores and we just relaxed.Wednesday, June 29th we left Holbrook about 9:30 a.m. and started East on I-40 again, this time headed for Gallup, New Mexico. We got into the USA RV park about 11:30 and got checked in. We are familiar with this park as we
stayed here twice last year, both going to and leaving the Balloon Fiesta in October. It is a very nice park, although the sites are kind of close together with side by side parking. We didn’t go anywhere after we set up. The weather called for scattered thunderstorms and just before sundown we had a little rain. Then about 9:00 there was a whole line of thunderstorms that came through, but the bulk of the storm was West of us. We got a lot of noise and lightning flashes from afar, but only a little bit of rain and wind.Thursday we went out after lunch to do some local sightseeing. We drove through the old downtown, parked and walked around a little bit. Went into a couple of Indian trading post stores, of which there are dozens in Gallup, but didn’t find anything we couldn’t live without. We spent another hour or so driving around various parts of town before we finally went to the mall and spent a couple hours walking around there just window shopping and getting some exercise. After the mall we went back to the coach for the rest of the day. We didn’t do any geocaching because there are not a lot in and around Gallup and we had cached here last October, so we didn’t have any in town that we hadn’t found. It was too hot to go out into the desert looking for those type caches, so we just didn’t cache.
Friday, July 1st, half of 2011 is now officially gone. Yikes! We left Gallup around 9:30 and started East on I-40 again, this time headed for Milan, New Mexico, a little town next door to Grants, New Mexico, which is no big whop in itself. We go in about 11:00 and drove to the Speedo Truck Lube shop for the annual service on the coach. Every 15,000 miles, or once a year, we have to change the oil, oil filter, fuel filters and air filter. Since we never get close to 15,000 miles in a year, we do it sometime around June or July of each year. The last three years we went to various Speedo locations around the country and have been very happy with their service. For less than $300 we get the same service that the Cummins service center charged us $1,000 for the first time we had it done. The second year we went to a Monaco service center and they were over $800. There are Speedo’s all around the country, you get in and out in a couple hours, and they do it right. After we had the coach serviced we drove across the freeway to a little RV park in Milan where we got a full hookup site for less than $20. Of course, we are only a block from the busiest railroad line in the world, but we have heard trains before.
After we got the coach settled in we went out in the car to see what the Milan and Grants area looked like. Although I have driven through this area many times over the years, I have never had any reason to stop here and look around. Milan is just a small village, but Grants is about 8,800 population. We went to a Chinese buffet that the AAA book recommended and found it was very good. It was called the Canton Café and is right on the main drag, Santa Fe Avenue, or Old US 66. The selection was a little limited, but they had everything we liked and the quality was very good. The price was right too, $14 for both of us for lunch.
After lunch we drove around town a little bit, just seeing what was around. The answer, not much. Grants started as a farming town at the turn of the century, but in the 1950's a major uranium lode was discovered
and nearly overnight Grants became a mining town and the center of uranium mining in the U.S. The mines and mills closed in the 80's and the town has withered somewhat. We visited the Grants Mining Museum, which chronicled a lot of the
history of the town. They also had a mock underground mine that was interesting to walk through. Lots of pictures and tools of the trade to look at. We also looked for a couple of geocaches, just to keep our finger in the game. We found one and had to DNF one.We found the Elks Lodge during our tour, but found it didn’t open until 5:00, so we went back to the coach for a couple hours. About 5:30 we went to the Grants/Milan Elks Lodge and found an very nice lodge on a very big (6 acre) plot of land. I found from talking to the bartender that the lodge building used to be a community center for one of the mining companies. The Elks bought it and turned it into a very nice lodge building. They have a separate dedicated lodge room that used to be the bowling alley for the center. They kept the hardwood floors and ended up with a very elegant lodge room. One of the interesting features are the stained glass panels that line the entire room. The bartender told me that they had been in the original old Elks Lodge in Albuquerque and when they sold that building and moved to the suburbs, they were going to throw away all these beautiful stained glass panels. The Grants Lodge took them and installed them in their lodge room with backlighting that makes for a very regal look. They also have a huge ballroom that they rent out. There was a wedding reception being held while we were there.
The clubroom, or bar, is also very big, and, like most New Mexico Elks Lodges, they have a gaming room with slot machines. Jackie had forgotten that New Mexico allows slots in non profits, so she was quite happy when I pointed out the casino to her. She went in and played some nickle poker for an hour or so and turned $20 into $60. Yea Jackie! I had some drinks, watched TV and talked to the bartender. After a couple drinks and getting a new lodge pin for our banner, we headed back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Saturday, July 2nd, was another travel day. This time we are headed for Albuquerque, just about 100 miles East of Grants. It was a little windy and warm, but not enough to cause any driving problems. The closer we got to Albuquerque the worse the haze got in the air. There are a lot of forest fires in New Mexico, including one big one just about 70 miles Northwest of Albuquerque. We arrived at the Hidden Valley RV Resort around noon and got checked in. We are actually in Tijeras, New Mexico, a little town about 15 miles East of Albuquerque on I-40. It is up in the mountains, a thousand feet or so higher than Albuquerque.
We got the coach parked and everything set up by mid afternoon and then just stayed in and rested for the rest of the day. It looks like some thunderstorms are brewing for this evening. It is hot and humid, so we didn’t want to go out.With our arrival here in Albuquerque, where we will spend a week, I will publish this chapter of our story. When we leave here we will still be traveling in New Mexico for another week or so, so I will publish again in a couple weeks. Until we meet again, remember that it is much better to always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else. Bye.
