There's not much there but its worth a look around just to say you've done it. The trains go through the town centre, so if you're across the wrong side of the tracks from where you want to be when one comes along ( as we were) then you have to wait for it. Although it was clipping along at a stately 20mph or so, it took a full five minutes to clear the crossing area. Big trains.
So after Flagstaff we drove down to Sedona, and what a drive that was. Down through a wooded gorge lined with huge outcrops of orange stone that caught the sunlight and reflected it back so that the whole place was lit up.
Sedona is a small town an a bit touristy but nice nevertheless.
We ate lunch there on a terrace - pizza and lemonade - then drove back up the valley and onto Meteor Crater, via an abandoned campground come roadside gas station called Two Guns on the old Route 66.
I'm not sure how the campground survived in the first place, as its really in the middle of nowhere - real flat empty featureless nowhere. Why would you go there or even stop there overnight, even when it was fully up and running? Yet two miles up the road, there is a full blown and surviving gas station and RV park, but that is on the road to the crater so maybe that had something to do with it.
The crater is very odd but also very impressive. Bearing in mind its totally surrounded by absolutely nothing, just like the abandoned campground, there is now a huge visitor centre built on the rim of a massive hole in the ground, a 200+ metre meteor crater formed in just 10 seconds, 50, 000 years ago. The hole is the same depth as a 60 storey building and the base 23 football fields. Pretty big and starkly impressive, and really reinforces why the whole meteor thing its just not worth worrying about for average people.
But what puzzles me is why the first campsite died and why its where it was, given the big hole was already there. Although it was initially thought to be the work of a volcano gas explosion, despite there being no volcanoes anywhere nearby, they knew by the 1960s it was the work of a meteor. And given that time was space travel in its heyday, somebody obviously got their their business head in a muddle.
After that we continued on to Winslow and to la Posada, our hotel. Winslow is now a small town but back in the 1930- 1950s it was very busy and a major train stop. Fred Harvey was an English hotel entrepreneur who had moved west and provided good hospitality to travellers. Many movie stars came here to this hotel and each room has a little history of a famous guest who stayed in the room; ours is Paola Negri.
The whole place has been renovated as it was going to be demolished after it shut in the late 1950s but nobody could agree what to do with it and it was used as offices by the train company. But its not just any old hotel, the interior design and decor is actually the work of Mary Colter, who became America's most influential designer. She designed stuff for Fred Harvey along the Santa Fe railway line which passes just behind the hotel - although the rear was originally the front in the days when everybody travelled by train instead of road. Colter used natural American stuff as the basis for her work, instead of importing culture from Europe. As a result, this place is based on haciendas of SW USA, coupled with Hopi Indian decor. Sadly, the hotel never really prospered as anticipated as its opening coincided with the Great Depression.
No comments:
Post a Comment