Story By: Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
The El Rancho Hotel and Restaurant in Gallup, New Mexico is a spectacular place to stop and eat along Route 66. Why not eat where the movie stars ate back in the day? Just a walk through the front door, and you are confronted with a fabulous lobby that makes your head spin with visions of what it must have been like back in the 40s and 50s. The menu was chock full of movie stars such as Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Jackie Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Benny, and William Bendix, just to name a few. Lunch was fun, and we wandered around taking in the history of this establishment. Inside the lobby was an elaborate shoeshine stand that caught my eye. I could only imagine the many celebrities that spiffed up their shoes here and what kind of memories the shoe-shine boys (men) that worked that stand could tell us. Now that is the kind of Route 66 history that gets my juices flowing.
Gallup, New Mexico is near the Arizona border, and we had several more hours of driving time left, so we headed out with Winslow as a target stop for the night. We were looking for a Holiday Inn Express to stay at that we found on the internet. As we approached town we began looking for the signs. We found motel signs but not the one we were looking for. And now it was beginning to rain…again. We got to the last exit and still hadn’t found the Holiday Inn Express, so I took the last exit and doubled back through town. We happened upon the “standin’ on the corner” intersection made famous by a tribute to the Eagles song “Take it Easy.” It was getting late and was beginning to rain pretty hard, so we googled the address to the hotel and put that into Mel’s GPS. That took us back to the first hotel we passed, but it was now a Best Western. We mentioned that to the hotel staff, and they told us it hadn’t been a Holiday Inn Express for over six years. Remember that next time you look for something on the internet.
Now I was disconnecting my battery every night and was leaving a vent window open, so I didn’t lock myself out of the car inadvertently. It was raining pretty hard now and I was concerned about getting even more rain inside the car. I asked the lady at the desk if I could leave the car in the check-in area by the front door until the rain slowed down. She was quite kind and allowed me to leave the car there overnight. I’m glad she did as the rain came down in sheets that night. In the morning the rain had passed on and the sun was shining. It turned out to be a wonderful time for a photo op session at the “corner.” We ate breakfast and headed straight over to take pictures and stock up on more souvenirs. I was wandering around trying to get the perfect shot when Carlene asked me if I got a picture of the big Route 66 sign that was painted in the intersection. I had walked across it multiple times and didn’t even notice it. Thanks Carlene, for pointing out the obvious before it was too late to capture it.
Around about this time we noticed that we had passed the Wigwam Tee Pee Motel that I really wanted to see. It required a detour off the road to find and in our haste to find a place to stay before it started raining again, we completely forgot it. With all the drama that was going on, I didn’t want to go back for it. So that, too, remained on the bucket list until we drove Route 66 back to Oklahoma earlier this year. They say you aren’t going to see everything on Route 66 the first time through anyway, so now that we live on Rt 66, we have, and will continue to be seeing more.
Back to our adventure, it is now time to hit the road again, we still have Flagstaff, Arizona, (don’t forget Winona), Kingman, Barstow and San Bernardino to go. Are we going to make it to all of those towns? We still hadn’t decided. You’ll have to wait until next week’s story to find out.
