Great Stays: #2 La Posada - Winslow, AZ

If you follow this blog you know I talk about Winslow, AZ a lot. I'm not from there, and I don't even know anybody from there either. But, Winslow makes an impression on you especially as a Route 66 traveler. There is a lot going on

in this little town that not only touches on Route 66 but a lot of other areas in history. See my previous article "Winslow, Arizona - Transportation Hub of the Western U.S." about some of that history. 

The La Posada Hotel is a former Harvey House in Winslow that has had several different lives in the past. It's current life is as a resort and luxury hotel, that also functions as a meeting place for many Winslow events. But the hotel was originally built as a Harvey House under the design and direction of famed architect Mary Colter.

Mary Colter was a legend in Southwestern architecture, and a favorite architect of the Fred Harvey Company. Colter was in tune with the Southwestern  landscape and culture and was able to design hotels that captured that spirit. Stucco, bare timbers, Navajo rugs, as well as Hopi and Mexican decor all tastefully placed where the signatures of her hotels. The La Posada was a true showpiece of her telents when it was competed in 1929. 

The La Posada was open as a hotel and dining room to accommodate cross country Santa Fe Railway travelers. These travelers would either stay for meal service while the train underwent watering and/or refueling, or would choose to stay at the La Posada as a resort with The Painted Desert, Petrified Forrest, and Navajo and Hopi lands nearby. 

The La Posada would remain a jewel in the crown of the Fred Harvey Company, and Santa Fe's crown. The Hotel would attract a wide range of travelers including a huge list of celebrity's, many of which also have rooms named after them in the hotel, some of the rooms are those they actually stayed in.

The hotel would see hard times as the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and Great Depression would start after its opening. The Hotel would stay open until 1957, when it was fully purchased by Santa Fe to become the headquarters of there sub district. Santa Fe needing the space for offices would sell most of the La Posada's art and furniture, keeping only a few of the old hotel rooms in place to serve as VIP quarters, and a dormitory for on call train crew. With its merger with Burlington Northern imminent Santa Fe would move their HQ elsewhere in Winslow in 1994. The building would sit vacant until 1997 when its was finally taken over by its new owners and sent on the path to restoration. 

Today the La Posada is fully restored and worth a visit, and if you can a stay. The dinning room called the "Turquoise Room" serves phonominal food, and is named after the top notch dining service that Santa Fe use to offer in special dining cars. With a gourmet menu that serves a lot of unique options, that are based on gourmet Southwestern, original faire served by the Harvey House, and other original options. All served with fresh ingredients from many local growers. 

The hotel itself is fully restored with beautiful grounds, lobby, artistically decorated corridors, and meeting rooms in essence the hotel is a beautiful Southwestern resort, as Mary Colter originally designed it. The hotel rooms are beautifully decorated, and immerse you in both the Southwest, and the mind of Mary Colter. The La Posada prides itself on the fact that no two rooms are alike. 

The rooms are as romantic as they are breathtaking, and come in standard, deluxe, whirlpool, and balcony room. You can look the photos up online at La Posada's website. Like most really great stays, accommodations will cost you a little more then usual ranging from $119 to $169 a night depending on the type of room.

http://laposada.org/hotel_rooms.html

For families there are rooms with two beds available, and Winslow is a family friendly town. A stay here would be great for kids, especially those who like trains since many BNSF trains travel through here. The Painted Desert and Petrified Forrest National Parks are also nearby, as is the very cool Old Trails Museum. 

Overall the La Posada is a great stay and worth a visit to. If you can't stay the night try to stop by the Turquoise Room for a meal and to stroll around the hotel and its  grounds.  

Route 66 Family Fun - Geocaching Route 66

So you've been traveling several hours and the kids are starting to get a little bit irritable. That in turn make your significant other a bit irritable to and now passing the frustration on to you. 

"OK" you say "Time to pull over and get some air". But wait, what are you saying? Your not set up for a picnic, and you can't find a park with a playground, so what do you do? How about Geocaching?

If you don't know what Geocaching is, Geocaching is like a treasure or scavenger hunting using a GPS, or a GPS enabled smartphone like a iPhone or Android to find the treasure called a Geocache. Geocaches are hidden in a number of places, parks, businesses, landmarks, and so on. Basically you can be guided to a Geocache by getting the coordinates online and entering them into a trail GPS, or via a Geocaching app which will provide you with cache info and guidance to the cache. One of the best resources is Geocaching.com  (http://www.geocaching.com/) and its app. 

However, Geocaching.com isn't the only place to get Geocaching info. There are other Geocaching sites out there, but sometimes places like national parks, individual town park districts, and organizations will create and list special Geocaches on their website. They do this to increase visitors and also use the caches and/or their locations to help visitors learn a little more about a particular area. 

One great example presented by the National Park Service along Route 66 is a series of geocaches hidden in Petrified Forrest National Park (http://www.nps.gov/pefo/planyourvisit/geocaching.htm). The park service has the coordinates listed for each Geocache on

the website, as well as listed on Geocaching.com too. 

Here are some other examples:

California 

http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=b21ca00f-bc83-48fa-97b4-4b90ae4f5c46

Missouri 

http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=c7bdb9a4-1909-4091-8aef-997337733892

Kingman, AZ

http://www.kingmanlions.org/AZ66Geocaching/Route%2066%20Association%20of%20Arizona.htm

Trust me there are caches all along the route including one at the Blue Whale, and near the Cadillac Ranch. Geocaching is a great way of getting everyone out if the car and cooperating on a purposeful adventure, that usually won't take anymore then 15 minutes. Kids love it because its a treasure hunt, and they are always anxious to see what's inside. Adults love it because its requires some imagination, and allows one to stretch after hours in the car, that and it burns off some of the kids excess energy. 

I do need to warn you that not all geocaches are easy to find and/or get too. Geocaching provides a rating system to help you with this, using stats to rate ease of the find and terrain. Traveling with kids it will help to look for caches with one star each in these fields. But keep it in mind higher star caches are sometimes hidden in tough or dangerous terrain. 

Also the there are two rules for Geocaching:

1)Try to find the cache without being seen

2)If you take something from the cache you must leave something.

I would also suggest looking for caches near your home first to give you a good idea how Geocaching works. 

If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment.

Travelers Retrospective #6: Final Take

You know today July 4th reminds me of that first trip down 66. Part of the reason we took a week, 7 days and not longer was that we had to be elsewhere by July 4th. My wife who I previously mentioned is a Californian, wanted to visit one set of grandparents and then spend the 4th with the other. 

Let me tell you there is nothing more American the spending July 4th in a town called Independence, in the shadow of Mount Whitney. 

But that brings me to my reason for this post. I got a recent e-mail (Route66forFamily@gmail.com FYI) from someone reading this series who asked if I skipped Oatman, AZ for any particular reason. Basically my answer was time. Time on the way out to California, but on the way back we cuaght what we missed which is why I'm writing this final entry in the series.

We finally got out of California on July 11, 2005. My wife wanted to do some of the driving back so we stayed on I-40 till Needles and then got back on to 66 to hit what we missed on the way to. I remember hitting a town called Golden Shores for gas, and with how low we where at that point the heavenly reference made by the towns name seemed fitting. After that it was on to Oatman, and Kingman. The ride into Oatman East or Westbound is filled with curves and hills and just about require Dramamine. Having grown up in the deserts and mountains of California my wife handled the road to Outman beautifully, and despite having never driven the road before it almost seemed as if she had ESP driving it with. Her past experiences gave her the ability to anticipate every curve and hill in the road and the ability to understand when to speed up and slow down at particular times.

To be honest Oatman looks about the same in person as it does in the pictures that you will see of it. The day we visited though the town had a great deal of traffic and cars parked everywhere do to some sort of special event. So we didn't get to stay long and also didn't get a chance to see the famous Oatman Hotel. Oatman was cool and I would like to visit it again and perhaps spend a little more time.

The road out of Oatman is as winding twisting  and hilly as the road into Oatman. As you climb one of the final hills leaving Oatman you will find an overlook looking out at Oatman in the valley below. But as you look towards one of the curves below you you'll see something very frightening that is the remains of a school bus and VW bug that at one point in this routes history had gone off that curve and down the cliff below. We tried the best we could to get photos of the vehicles. To say the least this site is frightening yet at the same time kind of cool.

Eventually the road begins straighten out as you come back down into the next valley as you find yourself approaching Kingman,  Arizona. Kingman is connected to 66 through the famous song. But to be honest there really isn't all that much of Kingman so we found ourselves passing through Kingman rather quickly. Then we returned back to I 40 and later that day finally ended up in Winslow for stay at the La Posada. 

The next day July 12 we would stop by the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest for a visit since we had also missed these two sites on the trip to California it doesn't take very long to actually run through both of these national parks. I would definitely have to say that you would want to check both these parks out if you're passing through the area I only wish that we had more time to spend in the two parks which are basically connected to each other.

After that we where back onto I-40 and I-44 a few more days until we got into Eastern Oklahoma. On July 15 we left Claremore, Oklahoma and proceeded to follow Route 66 through that area of Oklahoma through Kansas and to Joplin Missouri and back to I-44. To be honest there's really not much I'll see in these three areas in route to Joplin from Claremore is mainly through small towns and agricultural areas. Although it is part Route 66 and Route 66 experience if you should happen to miss these areas you really won't be missing much. 

After that there really wasn't anything else that we missed. We decided however to stop in Springfield Illinois to see some of the sites. There is quite a bit of history in Springfield, Illinois both national or state. If you can you might want to work out a day in Springfield Illinois on your route 66 trip. There is both Abraham Lincoln history to be found in Springfield, Illinois. 

Overall if you put all the things we had missed together into one day it probably would've taken us the extent of the whole day or less to cover what we missed on the way too. 

If your trip gives you the ability to return the same way that you had came then you may want to consider breaking route 66 up into different sections and stopping to see some of the major sites on the way to California and the more minor sites on the way back from California. But of course that's all up to you based on the time you have and what your starting point would be.

Remember if you have any questions about planning your trip please email me and let me know also don't hesitate to post something on my blogs for an area.

Travelers Retrospective #3: June 26, 2013

We left Santa Rosa having scoped out what was left of Route 66 the night before while hunting for a place to get dinner, and ending up at the Sun & Sand a Route 66 classic. Our next stop was Clines Corners which in retrospect I believe I could have easily passed and missed nothing. It's nothing more then a  tourist trap with a shop of nothing special items. Sorry Clines Corners! 

We had lunch in Moriarty, and the followed some old alignments around many parts of Albuquerque. The terrain gives way to the old road as it was carves our of the Malpais (lava badlands) and we see and feel the curving winding route past old missions and adobe settlements now long forgotten, and occasionally see Whiting Brothers gas stations also long forgotten. By the afternoon we where in the red rocks near Gallup. We choose to miss seeing the Acoma Pueblo since as nice as its suppose to be its a trip in itself. Route 66 makes its way through downtown Gallup and gave us a chance to see a town that once catered to 66, but now caters to I-40. We passed hotels like the movie star magnet the El Rancho, and with the sun getting made our way onto I-40, another Interstate section built on Route 66, and made our way to Holbrook for the night to stay in the Wigwam Motel. It was quiet and relaxing there, and we had a blast.