Got Our Kicks on Route 66
- Dina Lozofsky
- Apr 17
- 4 min read
For our first “roadtrip” as homeless nomads we spent about a week traveling to New Orleans, where we planned to spend a month at an Airbnb. When we left our (former) house for the very last time, we had no idea/plan for how we were going to get there, where we were going to stay or anything else. We just knew we needed to be in New Orleans on April 8th. (As many of you know, I don’t usually leave things unplanned, but we really had zero time in the last week of escrow to do any planning at all and didn’t know for sure until then when we were going to leave Los Angeles).
Quite randomly and without any planning, we ended up following Route 66 for a bunch of the drive - something we would have done eventually, but this was unintentional serendipity. Below is a screenshot from a Lonely Planet travel book* on Southwest US roadtrips. We mostly followed it from Kingman, Arizona to Amarillo, TX.
Some highlights (many more photos in the gallery):
We joined Route 66 at Kingman, Arizona - we were traveling east on the 40 and Craig says, “hey, there’s a slight detour we can take to drive on old Route 66 - should we take it?” Yes, yes we should. That’s just what started us on this fun path.
The highlight of that day was our stop at Seligman, which has a lot of wonderful kitschy gift shops and old Route 66 stores/restaurants. Gotta admit, stickers were bought for our devices.
That day we also stopped at Williams, Arizona for lunch - Williams is best known for being the gateway to the Grand Canyon. It has a cute little old downtown area, also very Route 66, with some great restaurants.
We found a fabulous little breakfast all day place - Anna’s Place, to be exact…
We then took a non-Route 66 detour, to stay at a resort in Sedona for a couple days. We’ll call that our Flagstaff stop on Route 66 😉. We definitely need to go back to Sedona - we enjoyed the red rock views, but were too exhausted from the selling/moving out process to properly enjoy the hiking, etc in the area. Plus, the weather wasn’t great. But check out how pretty it was:
The next day we got to enjoy TWO touristy stops on Route 66 on the way to Gallup, NM. First up, Meteor Crater - 43 miles outside of Flagstaff, it’s the largest mostly intact meteor crater in the world and is credited as the impact site where they figured out how the craters actually get there, from meteor impacts, not volcanic events as scientists originally thought. They estimate the meteor was about 150 feet across, weighing several hundred thousand tons, and impacted the earth 50,000 years ago. The meteor disintegrated from dropping to earth and the impact, so that nothing is left but the crater, which is 700 feet deep, 4,000 feet across and 2.4 miles around. You can take a guided tour around part of the ridge, or walk up/down to some viewing platforms yourself - it was really windy that day, so we chose to just take a quick trip up to the highest point and the lowest. We really enjoyed this stop (there were also a movie, a 4D experience, exhibits and a coffee shop).
One funny note, the crater is technically “in” Winslow, Arizona, whose only claim to fame is the Eagles song.
Our next stop, Petrified Forrest National Park. It’s famous for the Triassic fossils, petrified wood, and “painted desert.” We learned some cool stuff about the mammals that lived way back when (some of them looked like dinosaurs!), funky petrified wood sprinkled around amazing picturesque badlands.
We spent most of the next day in Albuquerque, wandering around the cute old town area, having lunch at a super duper Mexican restaurant that was recommended online and enjoying the natural history museum - can you tell that we like dinosaurs?
We took another detour from Route 66 to stay in Santa Fe (because we had never been there) - we found the cutest updated, remodeled motel there - The Mystic. If you find yourself in the area and need a quick, cheap, comfortable place to stop, I recommend it. Dinner was good, they had live music that night, and breakfast the next morning was included and satisfying.
The next day we made it to Amarillo, TX, the last stop on our Route 66 adventure. We would have enjoyed the area more, but there was an unexpected late snow/ice storm. We were a little worried about getting out the next morning, but it all worked out ok. I will say, don’t forget your towel! We needed it to wipe the ice off our windows before getting on the road that morning (Don’t Panic! #IYKYK)
One last note - one of the things we promised ourselves was that any time we are driving long(ish) distances, we would try to find adventures or touristy sites along the way for exercise/stretching/fun! That’s how we ended up with some of the adventures described above - remember, the journey is the destination. The “funniest” one was the Blue Hole in NM - it’s just a deep, clear swimming hole around which they built a diving program. It was pretty, but makes me laugh that we actually stopped.
* Lonely Planet is my favorite series of travel guide books - they give us great suggestions/recommendations and are useful both in the US and worldwide.
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