Healing on Route 66

It had been a very long September, and we finally found ourselves heading east and back to Chicago in early October. The one week trip to California for my wifes mothers funeral had turned into three, and left us drained both physically and mentally. So with no rush to return home and needing time to switch gears in between, we decided to try to follow Route 66 home where we could.

The second day out we left Needles, CA and made our way into Arizona. We slowly lost the morning clouds and fall haze, as the sky opened up and gave us beautiful light blue skies with little puffy white clouds. In a way such skies seem to be natures definition of the happiness one gets when hitting the open road. Even though our hearts where still pretty heavy from what we had gone through in California, and what we were heading back to in Illinois, we felt as if we had some time to smile, laugh, and just enjoy being on the journey itself and being together as a family.

When we got close to Winslow, AZ it was clear that we needed to stop somewhere for lunch and it was at that point I made the suggestion we stop off at the La Posada Hotel's, Turquoise Room. Even though we had stayed at the La Posada before, we had yet to eat at the Turquoise Room and not having done so had always haunted my wife and I. We pulled off I-40 and stopped to fill our tank up at a local gas station, and as I climbed out of the car my legs felt as they usually do after hours behind the wheel, stiff, shaky and needing a good stretch, and that meant it was definitely a good time for lunch. So with my duty to my Jeep fulfilled it was time for my family and I to do our duty to ourselves and get a bite to eat, so off to the La Posada and the Turquoise Room we went. At that point it had been over five years since we had been to the La Posada last, and we were stunned by the changes we saw. True to their word the hotels owners had restored Mary Jane Colters crown jewel to its Harvey House days glory, and even improved upon it. The dirt parking lot was now paved in the section closest to eastbound Route 66, while the section closest to the hotel itself was now the home to one of the most beautiful examples of a Southwestern garden we had ever seen.

In many ways the restorations and improvements seemed to fulfill Colters original vision of the hotel, and the fictionalized history she assigned to it, to assist her in its architecture and design. In Arnold Berke's Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest the author gets in depth with Colters original concept of the hotel, and its fictional mythos. For her backstory for the La Posada, Colter envisioned the hotel as a sprawling hacienda estate started by 17th century Spanish settlers, who in future generations would rise to prominence by raising cattle on the Northern Arizona plains. Each generation and century would add to the grand hacienda, turning it from a simple ranch home into and impressive mansion estate fit for the families lavish lifestyle, and many visitors. This fictional backstory gave Colter the guidance she needed in planning everything from the general layout of the hotel, to the fine details within it's decor, furnishings, landscaping, and even down to the Turquoise Rooms china patterns.

As we got into the Turquoise Room, it all came back to us from our prior visit how grand this grand dinning room really was. The Spanish Revival decor, rich with its Talavera, tapestries, bright colors, and red Spanish tile truly evoked the Southwestern spirit of design, that gives one a sense of grandeur, and openness. In many ways it also evoked feelings of warmth and welcoming, that made it clear the Turquoise Room would be more like an experience than just a meal. Despite hosting a larger event the staff still welcomed us in, sitting us in back near a window overlooking the active BNSF tracks, and panoramic plains beyond. Sitting there at that particular moment and time we got the feeling of being where we were suppose to be, and a sense of being home while away came over us.

It wasn't to much longer before we had food in front of us, starting with the Turquoise Rooms unforgettable corn bread. My wife dug into the scrumptious agave, honey, and butter topped corn bread and began to tear up a little. Not only was it a wonderful tasty delight, but it had reminded her of something her mother would have loved, and something of she had shared with her once before. As lunch carried on my wife's sadness began to fade and a smile came over her face, as she realized the meal reminded her of so many good times the two of them had together. In a way it was far more than just corn bread, ice tea, braised beef, and a Ceasar salad, but a healing experience. The warm sunshine, good food, the Turquoise Room, and the La Posada itself helped to remind my wife that even in mourning, the right circumstances, and environments could heal.

With our bellies full, we bid the Turquoise Room farewell and walked around the La Posada for a bit. The mixture of southwestern decor and creative fine art details helped to temporarily remove us from everything, and we lost ourselves for a bit. Mentally we all became a little more relaxed, and accepting of our situation, yet also optimistic. Now, I'm not going to claim the La Posada is a place for healing or closure, but for us on that trip two days out from a dark event in our lives the La Posada, and Turquoise Room helped bring us closer to healing.

As we set out on the road again we continued to travel Router 66 where we could. As we visited some of our old haunts along the way we continued to come together as a family remembering better times when we traveled the route together, and healing through that. The day after the La Posada and Turquoise Room, we would reach Amarillo, TX  by mid to late-afternoon. For my wife, one site she always loved along Route 66 was Cadillac Ranch, a place she had photographed extensively on our first trip and a place she could recollect her mother always wanted to visit upon seeing those photos. Wishing to leave her mark in memory of her mother my wife decided that she too would like to add some graffiti of her own to the site.  So we dropped into a Home Depot a few miles up the road to buy bright red spray paint, something the staff there seemed accustomed to seeing by the smile on their faces when we told them. We must have spent a good hour and a half walking around the six derelict and half buried road yachts as my wife photographed them again, and left graffiti in memorial to her mother on a few of them. Again the healing process kicked in and although my wife did cry a little while there and after, the ability to bring some part of her mother to Cadillac Ranch did seem to help.

The day after that we would see the Blue Whale of Catoosa, a place my son had always loved along the route. After fighting traffic through Oklahoma City, and Tulsa we hit the giant blue whale and former waterpark around late morning/earlier afternoon, or to put it another way in time for an impromptu picnic which had to take place in the car do to early fall winds. For some strange reason every time we visit the iconic Route 66 landmark we tend to be there by ourselves, or maybe briefly with one other group of people. After geocaching the site, we took our pictures of ourselves in the whale recreating our stances and poses from previous visits and than took a few moments to sit and talk at the whale themed tables placed around the site. It's a quiet spot actually despite the noise from the road, a former stretch of Route 66 and now busy county road, nearby. The sun, fresh air and sound of wind blowing through the trees was a much needed respite and gave us the energy to push forward on our attempt to make it home that day, but also made us smile and laugh a bit as we revisited old memories from previous visits there. Again a healing moment bought on by the uniqueness of a site on Route 66.

The reminder of our trip would be uneventful at best, and hours after leaving the Blue Whale of Catoosa we would make it home in the early AM hours. Being home again would be surreal for the first few days, especially as we made very little contact with anybody, and mainly rested up from the long trip, and before catching up with the real world. As the next few months would roll out things would be hard for us in many different ways, but the healing and memories we had on our trip back would often carry us through.



 
     

Experiencing the Dining Car as It Use To Be

Train travel in the United States today is a far cry from what it once was. Only the long distance passenger trains have dining cars, and although the food is good and passengers are presented with a menu to choose from breakfast, lunch, and dinner much of the food comes semi-prepared. Dining on Amtrak is still a treat, and well worth experiencing both for its coolness factor and historical connection. Dining by rail though was once something completely different from what it is now. 

Back before the disintegration of the great passenger trains, dining by rail was something that helped distinguish one railway from another. Some railways even became famous for particular items on their dining car menus. Food on the dining car wasn't just sustenance to eat while the train sped along for many miles but instead it had become a gourmet dining experience that was on par with some of the larger cities finest gourmet eating establishments.

It wasn't always this way though dining cars really didn't come into fully functional service until around the time of World War I. Before then various food service  cars had been experimented with, railways tried everything from lunch cars to buffet cars to café cars, all of which came with varying results. Most of these experiments started back around the time of the transcontinental railway and lasted all the way through the late 19th century into the very early 20th century. For the most part though if passengers wanted to eat along the way in this time period it required passengers to deboard trains at towns where the locomotive was forced to stop to take on coal and water. One can only imagine the inconvenience of having to do such a thing especially with having to worry about weather or the possibility of missing ones train and/or meal. 

It was during this same period time that the Santa Fe Railway entered into an agreement with the Fred Harvey Company. The Fred Harvey Company would provide eating establishments at larger whistle stops for the Santa Fe and the Santa Fe would agree to extend the time it took take on coal and water for their trains so that customers could have a leisurely meal at one of Harvey's restaurants. These restaurants became known as Harvey Houses, and I will take a deeper look at some Harvey Houses in postings to come. But Harvey Houses did something else they gave passengers a quality meal that was stress-free since Harvey Houses were located close to the Santa Fe tracks, the food was prepared in conjunction with trains that where stopped over, and managers would often wonder the Harvey House dining rooms notifying passengers of departing trains.

As a decades wore on locomotive's became more technically advanced which required them to stop less for coal and water. Eventually locomotives only had to make longer stops at larger cities meaning many of the whistle stops where they had previously allowed passengers to the leave the train in order get a meal where now totally bypassed as the train passed through them at high speed. For the railways it was time to finally have onboard dining facilities. By the 1910's advancements in onboard cooking, and refrigeration finally gave the railways the chance to produce effective dining cars. By the 1930s dining cars were at their peak, and so to was each railways need to brag that it had the best food. To say the least the battle between the railways for the best dining car would carry-on for 30 more years finally culminating in the 1960s with the Santa Fe Super Chiefs Turquoise Room, a special five-star dining room located in the Super Chiefs dining car and known for attracting the glitz and glamour of movie stars and other famous people of the era. 

By the 1970s the railways, specifically the passenger lines would go into to decline and many of them would disappear from memory. However memories of the wonderful food on their dining cars still remain and some have dedicated themselves to maintaining the memory of this food.

The books above James D Porterfield's Dining By Rail, and George H Foster and Peter C Weiglen's The Harvey House Cookbook are two great books commemorating the railway dining experience.

Dining By Rail functions as both a great history book and cookbook. Porterfield gets in-depth with the evolution of dining cars on various railways and then also manages to get in depth with how the various railways came about designing some other most famous menu options. Porterfield carefully brings together some brief histories and recipes from over 40 different railways. One of my favorite parts of this book is when Porterfield mentions the great French Toast Battle in which the Northern Pacific, Soo Line, Union Pacific, Santa Fe, and Pennsylvania railways try to compete for the best French Toast recipe, and you can find the French Toast recipe for each of these railways right here in this book.  There are hundreds of other excellent recipes from the railway dining cars listed in this book as well as a lot of great insight into life in the dining car. It's well worth the read in these recipes are definitely worth trying at home if you want to get a taste of how high-quality the food was I many of these dining cars.

The Harvey House Cookbook is another fantastic book to add to the overall experience of dining by rail. The book is dedicated to Harvey Houses, but is intermixed with recipes from various Santa Fe passenger trains. This is another fantastic book for gaining both historical insight into the operations of Harvey Houses and Santa Fe passenger trains and for just getting overall taste of what it must been like to actually have eaten at these places during their heyday. The book covers some of Fred Harvey's most notable resorts like the La Posada in Winslow, AZ, and the La Fonda in Santa Fe, NM, as well as some of it's other operations like Los Angeles, and Chicago Union Stations, and Chicago's Midway Airport. This book has a fantastic layout in which the historical text is in between the recipe sections which are themselves laid out by meal segments. All though this book isn't as in depth with Harvey House history as some other books it is a fantastic and should I say hands on or taste buds on introduction to Harvey House's which is extremely unique for any book on this subject. The book also allows us to see how dining cars where developed by giving us a peek into the period in which rail travel dining transferred from Harvey Houses to actual dining cars since some recipes in this book come from the California Limited, Santa Fe's precursor to the Chief and Super Chief, and the first of their trains to present onboard dining in a first class manor.

I must own 2 dozen books on the Santa Fe, but of all of them these two are the only ones that give me a real feel for what it must have been like to have been there, and put this piece of history in such human terms through a connection to food.

Travelers Retrospective #4: June 27, 2013 Part 1

We left Holbrook that morning in a mad scramble. For a small town it has a busy rush hour on Monday mornings. It didn't take to long to get on to I-40 and we where on our way. Our first exit was exploring the route at Joseph City, and slowly making our way to the Jackrabbit trading post. "Here it Is" remarks the huge yellow sign with the Jackrabbit on it. If it looks sort of familiar it's because it was the basis for Lizzys Curio Shop in the movie Cars. Coincidentally, this is where we saw or first movie poster for Cars, keep in mind it was 2005 and the movie wasn't due out for another year. As far as I know the poster is still there as are the autographs of John Lassiter, and a few other celebrity's. 

Next up was Winslow, AZ. Feel free to sing the Eagles song Take it Easy since there is a street corner downtown dedicated to it. Winslow has a great visitors center to see, with helpful docents and cool stores nearby. We also saw the La Posada, an old Harvey House restored and making a life of its own. It's probably one of the most beautiful hotels we have ever seen.  

Immediately following Winslow we hit three more Arizona Route 66 attractions. The first attraction that we saw was Meteor City and of course it would be Meteor Crater. Meteor Crater is awesome and has a great visitors center dedicated to space exploration and meteors. Our son and kids in general love it rocks, and astronauts, what can I say.  

Next up are the Route 66 relics of Two Guns and Twin Arrows. Two Guns is now  in ruins (dangerous to explore), but back on the day was an tourist trap based on Old West lore. It had fake shoot outs, pony rides, rattle snake pits, and all the trappings of the late 40's through early 60's Western craze. 

Twin Arrows is a little further up. At that time we could see the two huge arrows sticking out of the ground on and angle,  but in following trips it was one and the remains of another sticking out of the ground. This is a really iconic place on

66 but has had a tragic recent past and fallen on hard times, and sadly is deteriorating quickly. I have heard that there is a restoration effort underway but I haven't seen much on it. 

After getting some photos there it was in to Flagstaff.

Continued in part 2