Standing on the corner

The song Take it Easy by the Eagles began to run through my head. I couldn't remember many of the words other than "standin' on the corner in Winslow, Arizona." Well, why not. I have never been to Winslow. This was such a fun stop. Tourists from everywhere, many on Harley's, were congregated on the corner taking turns. Leon fit right in.



I chose a spot by the old Indian in front of the very busy gift shop on the corner. The nice ladies inside turned out to be our tour guides for the town.


We had no clue about the La Posada Hotel. It was designed by the famous Grand Canyon architect, Mary Colter, and is the last of the great Harvey Houses of the 1930s. All passenger trains from Los Angeles to Chicago of the Santa Fe system stopped at this showplace. I so liked the flowers and the southwestern architecture that had it not been full for the Memorial Day weekend I would have booked a room in a minute.






We enjoyed a stroll down the new walkway alongside the tracks to go to a festival. It was so windy hardly anyone showed up so it was a no go but the walk was tremendous in the warm Arizona sun.






The town appears to have been pretty run down and is making its way back as a tourist stop but that is just my observation of this place on old Route 66.



Not far down the road is an attraction that Leon visited in the 1960s when he was driving across Route 66 on the way back to California after his stent in the military in Kentucky. The meteor crater hadn't changed much in the past almost fifty years, but the visitor center around it certainly had. This was his only view of the crater back in the day.




After we climbed a series of steps to a platform high above the crater we had a much better view but it cost more than the 50 cents he had paid too!
A huge iron nickel meteorite or dense cluster of meteorites, estimated to have been 150 feet across and weighing several hundred thousand pounds, struck here with a force greater than 20 million tons of TNT about 50,000 years ago. It left this bowl shaped cavity that was 700 feet deep and over 4000 feet wide.



Everyone in Winslow was talking about the new casino not far away that was having its grand opening but it sounded like a camping opportunity to us. After a nice supper at the restaurant we spent the night in the not so level parking lot at Twin Arrows Casino near Flagstaff. We went through the casino but spent not a quarter.