Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (Thanksgiving!) Nov 21-23, 2017

Right now, it’s all a blur. Long days spent in the car with no action to speak of. I do like Sirus radio – we’ve been singing along with the Beatles, Classic Vinyl and Willie’s Roadhouse for the entire trip. We’ve given up on staying at Best Westerns and are trying out Comfort Inns. So far, they’re much nicer, bigger rooms, better breakfast and about the same price.

There was a funky Italian dinner place in Shawnee, a small town outside of Oklahoma City. The Cesar salad was romaine lettuce, Pepperidge Farms croutons, and two full ramekins of some sort of bottled dressing. Jim’s chicken marsala and my veal piccata were both piled on spaghetti noodles and swimming in a watery liquid. The meal was ok but the flask of wine was good and the dinner rolls seemed to have cooked on the spot.

At one point, we left the freeway to drive the original Route 66 through Tucumcari. It’s a ghost town; abandoned buildings piled high with trash, looking burned or rotted, broken windows everywhere, sagging roofs and missing doors, no people or movement. Spooky. I think we’re too late for Route 66 anymore – it’s just a memory.

We drove from Shawnee to Albuquerque, and ended up eating at a Chili’s, of all things. We really hadn’t considered the Thanksgiving holiday – the Wednesday night before would be a busy night. We had a bad time finding anything that A: wasn’t fast food,B. wasn’t a biker bar tavern, and C. wasn’t hideously overpriced and more upscale than our jeans would allow. Therefore, Chili’s seemed the best choice. It wasn’t but it was hot and filled the void.

A word on driving through Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona, mostly on Hwy 40: The scenery is wildly varied but smooths out, loses all color and texture. Start with rolling blue-green hills, move into rolling pine covered trees, flattening out to miles and miles and miles of empty fields (it is November, but still), brown, black, grey, with a house here and there plunked down in the middle of nowhere. Then you get to Texas. From horizon to horizon, beige and grey, nothing growing, nothing moves but clouds. It’s ugly and empty, for hours on end.

But Arizona is different. After leaving Albuquerque, we headed north to Utah. The high dessert is colorful and filled with amazing buttes, mesas, canyons and cliffs of every imaginable shade of red, pink, orange, ocher, adobe, browns, whites and black. There are scrubby trees and bushes. The rocks fold on themselves and the faces of the cliffs are pocked with holes and caves. The road surface is perfect. It’s one long black ribbon fading off into the distance. There’s hardly anyone on the road so we went miles at a time being the only one there.

This is Navaho country with lots of huts, yurts and teepee sitting next to shacks, trailers and manufactured homes. Almost every yard is covered in broken down cars and trucks, falling down buildings, piles of tires. And every yard contains a brand new truck and a satellite dish.

We arrived in Kanab 3pm on Thanksgiving and it was a very good thing Jim thought ahead for a reservation. Most everything is closed but any open hotel is booked solid. Unfortunately for us, dinner options were severely limited. As in: almost none. We found one place, booked to the rafters. The front desk pointed us to a place 5 miles back, having an all-you-can-eat thanksgiving buffet which appeared to be mostly vegan. We were headed that way when we discovered a lone Chinese restaurant, doing a booming business. Again, food wasn’t terrible and it was hot and filling. Not a bad T-day meal, all things considered J