Take It Easy

April 5, 2018













Take It Easy

On our second day of travel from Phoenix to Colorado, we continued to mosey along, taking it easy, as we stopped repeatedly to check out places along the way. Our first stop was a short distance down the highway from where we spent the night in Flagstaff, the small town of Winslow, Arizona. Made forever famous by the Eagles song,”Take It Easy”, Winslow has capitalized on this as much as anyplace I have ever seen.





The song, originally written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey, it became the very first single ever released by the Eagles. The brief mention of Winslow, in the line, “Well I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona and such a fine sight to see, it’s a girl my lord in a flatbed ford, slowing down to take a look at me.” Has become the small town’s claim to fame and right there on a corner in the center of town is a statue of a man standing on the corner and of course a flatbed ford parked on the corner.

 

The entire small business section of town is focused on this corner with gift shops, diners and the like all along Main Street (Route 66) near the famous corner. Sadly the rest of the town is in pretty rough shape, with boarded up businesses and abandoned property dominating the landscape. But it was still kind of cool to join the mass of tourists stopping by the corner to check it out.







Farther down the highway, we stopped again. This time to visit the Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert National Monument. These National Park areas are located in Northeastern Arizona and feature incredible examples of desert ecosystems. The Petrified Forest National Park is named for its large deposits of petrified wood, covering about 230 square miles (600 square kilometers), encompassing semi-desert shrub steppe as well as highly eroded and colorful badlands.











Just to the North of Petrified Forest is the Painted Desert National Monument. The monument is a desert of badlands in the Four Corners area running from near the east end of the Grand Canyon National Park southeast into the Petrified Forest National Park. The Painted Desert is known for its brilliant and varied colors that not only include the more common red rock, but even shades of lavender.







The Painted Desert was named by an expedition under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado on his 1540 quest to find the Seven Cities of Cibola, which he located some forty miles east of The Petrified Forest National Park. Finding the cities were not made of gold, Coronado sent an expedition to find the Colorado River to resupply him. Passing through the wonderland of colors, they named the area "El Desierto Pintado" - The Painted Desert.







We drove first through the Painted Desert area and then South into the Petrified Forest. There was so much interesting stuff to see including Pronghorns, which I had never seen in the wild as well as a large selection of beautiful and well preserved petroglyphs, some ancient ruins and of course the fossilized wood that gives the park its name. Seeing huge petrified tree trunks that are not basically tree shaped rocks is fascinating.







After our trek through the parks, it was back on the highway toward Albuquerque, where we experienced something that I have never even come close to seeing before. Suddenly traffic was backed up to a near stop along the interstate, not so unusual, we assumed there was an accident ahead. We were startled to find that while the weather seemed fine, we were driving along slowly down to a single lane and suddenly we were in a wet snow that had obviously just fallen yet there was already about four inches on the ground. All along the interstate we jackknifed tractor trailers, cars spun off the road and a few seriously damaged vehicles. In less than a mile the snow was gone and traffic was back to normal. The weird micro-blizzard was less than a mile yet caused immense havoc.









In Albuquerque, there was one place that I really wanted to visit, The Unser Racing Museum. The wonderful museum that focuses on the careers of the racing Unser family from Albuquerque, specifically focusing in the careers of Al Unser Sr. and Al Unser Jr.  The Unser’s have a long family history in racing and a raft of accomplishments that would make any racer envious. With nine Indy 500 wins and hundreds of other major racing victories and championships the museum is an amazing legacy to generations of racers all in the same family.









The museum features an amazing selection of the racing vehicles that the Unser’s have driven over the years including cars from the Indy 500, the Pikes Peak hill climb, Nascar, Sprints and midgets and more. Perhaps the most interesting part of the museum was the trophy room filled with literally thousands of trophies from multiple lifetimes of successful racing.











www.unserracingmuseum.com/