Take Off Your Hobo Shoes, Part I

Beginning the third leg of my journey after turning in my room key Saturday, I paused for a short tour of Albuquerque, stopping first at the Model Pharmacy for lunch. Yes, pharmacy. Behind the hair clips and bath salts lurks a full soda fountain and lunch counter recommended by Roadfood afficianados Jane and Michael Stern.

Although the Sterns had suggested the green chile stew, the BLT on the menu caught my eye. When I asked the waitress for her favorite, it was decided: the BLT it was. While I was waiting for the pig strips to crisp, I attempted to snap a few pictures, but the camera seemed to make the natives restless and was soon tucked politely away. I wouldn’t leave without putting that milkshake equipment to good use, though.

At a table, reading the local weekly fish wrap (the Alibi) I had to fight the urge to spend a few matinee hours in a dark New Mexico movie theatre when I discovered one was playing Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in second-run. I reminded myself that that was no way to enjoy my limited time in Albuquerque and promptly decided to burn a bit of daylight at the Jiffy Lube instead. It was well past time for an oil change and I still had 800 miles to go.

Route 66 passes through Albuquerque, so I took the scenic route out of town.






Stopping along the way for gas…















…and a photo op at the Continental Divide.






That Frank is such a camera whore!


I’d love to spend more time in New Mexico someday, visiting Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, and that great big starlit sky. The state drove like a launching pad to heaven.

Conveniently near dinner time, I reached Holbrook, Arizona, where I planned to stop to eat at Joe & Aggie’s Café.


Joe & Aggie’s is an old, cozy, little café on the old Route 66, ideal for eating alone. I could kiss the Sterns for this one. When I asked the waitress what she’d recommend she told me “we sell a lot of the combo platters.” And no wonder: that taco and two -- er, tortilla thingies -- were very tasty.

I ordered a Miller Lite I’d seen on the menu, but when my waitress yelled from the kitchen “we don’t have Miller Lite. We’ve got Bud Light or Coors Light,” I took the Bud. When it arrived, I was amused by its blue aluminum bottle. I was further amused that it came with a wine glass. I thumbed through the humor book perched on the table while I waited for my meal – a book called “How to Make People Think You Are Normal” by Ben Goode. I somehow doubt that taking a picture of a stuffed rat in front of a wine glass full of Bud Light is a recommendation anywhere in that book. But here it is:


My waitress brought a small paper bag to the table along with my bill, telling me to keep the beer bottle. Then she took it to the kitchen, rinsed out the beer smell (“you never know nowadays”), and handed it back to me with another empty – this one red – for collecting dimes and pennies. It’d hold $6.50 in pennies, she told me. She hadn’t filled her dime bottle yet.

And that’s where the fun ends in Arizona. I hopped back on 40-W, headed for interstate 17. Headed for San Diego rather than LA, I would be correcting my route southward and leaving the old Route 66 parallel behind me. The new road should have come with a warning: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Steep grade, no exits, 124 miles. No gas, no food, no lodging. Gas up, get coffee, and pee now. That means you!”

There was no such sign.

Now, I didn’t mind the mountain grade (I once regularly enjoyed driving Monteagle Mountain in Middle Tennessee) but if New Mexico was a launch pad to heaven, Arizona was a sinkhole to hell -- if your version of hell is a place where you can't get anything you need and you can't escape.

I had hoped to stop for the night outside of Phoenix so that I could enjoy the city by daylight, as I had done in Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, but it proved impossible. Although I could see paradise by the Days Inn light looming seven miles ahead on I-17, the exit I needed to meet I-10 came first. So close to the city, I figured, that 101 loop and interstate 10 would offer plenty of opportunities to stop on the outskirts of town.

Well… I wasn’t WRONG, exactly. There were hotels along the 10. Several. All booked solid. Margie, a clerk at the Best Western where I all but broke down in exhausted frustration, mentioned something about a NASCAR race and the Phoenix Speedway, but even with the benefit of the web, I can’t figure out what was going on this weekend. Whatever it was, though, kept me from getting a room anywhere near Phoenix. In fact, Margie feared that, going west, I’d have trouble finding a room even in California.

Now, Margie required no special skills or mind-reading powers to know that I needed a bed, stat, so she went to work calling other hotels around town. Finally, she found a place with one room left. It was an expensive double room and I’d have to drive another hour south to get there, but it was available and I needed it, so we booked the room and I drove on to Gila Bend. Even after struggling to stay awake through the backwoods drive to the hotel, had we not already charged my credit card, I would have pushed on right past the Space Age Lodge.

The joy that would be Gila Bend… and the rest of my journey into the Pacific Time Zone… in Part II. Coming soon to a monitor near you.