Before leaving Grants, I walked around to take some pictures.
It was only then that I slowly started to put together the pieces of the story of Route 66. In short, it is one of the first roads in the US highway system that connected Chicago in the east to LA in the west. It was a very significant road until the I-40 opened, which resulted in the near obsolescence of Route 66. These days the route is experiencing some renewed recognition, and being declared as a “scenic drive” by some states in which it passes.
Grants’s main street is a small portion of Route 66, which explains the large number of motels, along with the terrible condition that they’re in, like this abandoned one:
When I was done in Grants I started driving out of New Mexico and into Arizona. There were a lot of signs at the sides of the roads advertising Indian souvenir shops, and all theses signs looked the same. I stopped for lunch at a gas station owned by the Hopi. When I got back to my truck I noticed that I parked it with all the big boys, and that it looks kinda ridiculous:
Driving some more, I saw a sign directing to the “Meteor Crater”. I had to check it out. Turns out it’s a crater created by a meteor some 50,000 years ago. It’s very hard to get it all in a picture, so here’s the best I could do:
I drove on the I-40 some more, and stopped at Seligman. I know, it sounds like a law firm and not like a town, but it is - another one that has Route 66 as its main street, but this one seemed to make a big deal out of it:
I got a room and the Romney Motel. The manager asked me where I’m from. I said I’m coming from Boston.
- “No, where are you originally from?”
- “Israel. Why? Where are you from?”
- “Israel! well, not me, but all my family lives in Bat-Yam”.
Bat Yam is a shitty city, just a little bit south of Tel-Aviv, which was really surprising and definitely amusing. His wife passed away a while ago and his only son lives with his own famiy in Las Vegas, so this gentleman was saving money for his retirement, which is coming very soon, so he can move to Israel to live with his extended family in fucking Bat-Yam.
I went to get dinner at “The Roadkill”.
To my right, took place the most manly conversation I ever heard. Four guys were sitting at the bar, wearing working clothes, baseball caps, and they all had rough, dirty hands, with black stains underneath the fingernails. One guy was talking about the deer he was hunting, and how it’s too expensive now to take them to the butcher. I couldn’t understand him fully because of his thick accent, but I assume he said something like “so now I have to cut them up myself” or “so now I stick my bare teeth in them and eat them alive”.
By the time I gave up parsing what he said, he was talking about a 2-inch, externally-threaded, em, something, and then the other guy said “oh, that’s what we used when we replace the motor of that old truck.” I was praying that they won’t turn to me all of the sudden and say “hey, stranger, what do you do for a living?”
Then I went to the only open bar in town, the Black Cat bar, where I had a couple of beers, nodded “goodnight” to the couple at the pool table, who were the only patrons besides me, and went to bed.
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