Winslow, AZ

TUE., NOV 15, 2022 thru SAT., NOV 19, 2022

We arrived at Homolovi State Park in Winslow, AZ on Tuesday, Nov. 15th after traveling 100 miles west on I-40 from Williams. We arrived before the official check-in time. The state park proved to be sticklers about not allowing you to check-in early so we killed time exploring the Visitor’s Center with Cheryl & Joe before we could head to our respective sites. We learned that “Homol’ovi” translated from the Hopi language means “place of the little hills.” 

Once we were all settled in our nice spacious sites, we enjoyed Happy Hour with the Hannafords at our tiny home later in the afternoon and were treated to a beautiful sunset. At the beginning of sunset, Cheryl, Joe & I went out for some pics then Joe & I went out later when the colors really started exploding. Temps were a bit chilly both times! Cheryl opted to pass on the second photo opp. Gary stayed in the comfort of our tiny home drinking his wine and never ventured out at all! 

Tuesday night we experienced a new low temp for us of 10 degrees. Wow! That’s New Hampshire weather!

On Wednesday, Nov. 16th, the pod visited Meteor Crater, a National Natural Landmark. It’s the “Best Preserved and First Proven meteor crater in the world.” The crater is 550 feet deep, equivalent to a 60-story building, and over 4,000 ft across. Or putting it another way, it’s approx. 1 mile across and 3 miles in circumference. Or to put it in sports terms, 20 football games could be played simultaneously on its floor with 2 million people watching from the side slopes. Hard to fathom the scale! Apollo astronauts trained here because the terrain closely matched the moon’s. And more recently NASA has sent people here on the Mars project to study.

There was an informative Visitor’s Center. The building was designed by famous architect Phillip Johnson in the 1950s. (The same architect who designed the Water Garden we visited in Fort Worth last year.) In addition there was a 10-minute film on how the crater was formed… Over 50,000 years ago a several-hundred-thousand ton meteor hit the earth so fast that it carved a giant bowl-shaped cavity into the earth in seconds. The meteor itself disintegrated on impact.

Besides the Visitor’s Center and the short film, there was a Disney-esque ride through outer space with a rabbit at the helm! We, of course, did the ride as well. And, last but not least, there was the big hole in the ground itself to visit. We weren’t allowed to walk on the crater floor unfortunately, but viewed it from outdoor observation platforms. It was hard to truly get a sense of the size at that vantage point. 

On Wednesday after our visit to the meteor crater, we visited Two Guns, a real live ghost town located outside Winslow AZ. Hard to know fact-from-fiction but there’s a cave nearby where supposedly Apache warriors were killed by the Navajo. Some might say the Navajo had just cause since those same Apaches had killed almost everyone at a Navajo encampment. We did not find the cave… thankfully. There’s remnants of a zoo… where there were rumors of animals not being treated well, a “Graffiti Gas Station” and even remnants of an old KOA campground. Big thanks to Cheryl for finding this interesting little gem!

On Thursday we visited Petrified Forest National Park. An absolute gem! Another WOW moment for the pod! The entire National Park lies within the Painted Desert, which is an area in Northern Arizona that is 120 miles long and 60 miles wide. The park itself is much smaller with a fabulous 28-mile scenic drive that offers various hiking opportunities and view points. Petrified Forest is the only National Park that has a portion of Historic Route 66 within its boundaries. It has such a diverse landscape! 

We saw the Painted Desert with its badland hills and buttes of vibrant colors ranging from red, purple, gray, blue and shades in between. The term badlands means an area that has “extensive tracts of heavily eroded, uncultivable land with little vegetation.” I always thought badlands was the name of a national park and that was it! We visited Painted Desert Inn, with its pueblo style architecture. Now a museum, it was built in 1937 by Mary Coulter who was the architect that designed so many of the buildings in the Grand Canyon. It also still has original handmade and painted skylight panels created by the CCC during the 1930s, inspired by Navajo and Hopi Culture. 

We saw the few remains of historic Route 66 in the park which were old telephone poles and a Ford Model T marking the spot where the original road crossed the park. 

We saw petrified wood that now resembles rock in brilliant colors including Old Faithful… a Giant Log that’s petrified. It’s almost 10 feet around at the base. And we saw petroglyphs.

One of our favorite areas to explore was Blue Mesa which resembled a moonscape with it’s colors of gray, white, and blue. We were “wowed” at every turn! Loved this National Park!

On the drive back we stopped at an old hotel for a photo opp. Rooms were teepees with vintage cars parked out front!

A short video of the Painted Desert in Petrified Forest National Park. 

And a short video of the Blue Mesa area in Petrified Forest NP

Standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. That was us on Friday, Nov. 18th! Such a great small town! Of course we visited the iconic “corner” of historic Route 66 made famous by the Eagles first hit song, Take it Easy, with lyrics “well I’m standin’ on a corner in Windslow Arizona, such a fine site to see. It’s a girl my lord in a flat bed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.” The town did a fabulous job marking the corner with two bronze statues, one of whom is a likeness of Jackson Browne, the writer of Take it Easy. There’s also a mural and a flatbed Ford truck. It’s a great photo opp! 

While in town we visited Winslow’s 9-11 Memorial which included two steel beams from the actual wreckage. We also visited the Old Trails Museum and chatted with the knowledgeable Director. The museum houses Santa Fe Railroad memorabilia, original western artifacts, vintage Route 66 items and other cool stuff. 

Lastly we had lunch and toured La Posada, Winslow’s “crown jewel.” This amazing piece of historic architecture is often referred to as the last great trackside hotel in the country. It “was the last, most elegant, and most expensive of the great Fred Harvey Hotels built by the Santa Fe Railroad.” Designed by Mary Colter, who designed many magnificent buildings in the Southwest in the 1920s and 1930s, La Posada was her favorite. She is often called the grandmother of American Southwest architecture. La Posada was originally called Winslow Harvey House, and was closed in 1958 due to the decline of American railroad travel. After being closed for decades, the hotel was purchased before it was destroyed and has been lovingly restored by Tina Mion, an artist, and her husband. The hotel features many of Tina Mion’s works on the walls. In the restaurant there is a series of 7 lithographs that were first commissioned by Mary Colter entitled “The Seven Stages of Drunkenness” that are still on display. The whimsical lithographs follow the exploits of two cowboys. 

We wandered around the downtown for a little while going in and out of shops and seeing the “World’s Smallest Church” dedicated to veterans. We all loved this small town of 10,000 people. 

Winslow’s Christmas parade was going to be the next day, Saturday. We thought about going but instead the pod did a few short hikes in Homolovi State Park which still has 14th century ruins of the Anasazi, who are known today as the Hopi. The Hopi lived here from 1300 to 1400 AD. At its peak there were 2300 rooms comprising this large Hopi settlement. Unfortunately today there isn’t much left of the ruins. Many have been pillaged or destroyed before measures were taken to limit access. But we enjoyed being out in the fresh air, walking, and staying close to home before we hit the road on Sunday to arrive in the Sedona area.