Monday

Our plan, to get ahead of the hot weather, worked fairly well. We reached Flagstaff, Arizona by midday where the higher elevation resulted in somewhat cooler temperatures. It has been a long time since I've seen the mountains north of Flagstaff with no snow. The most common time of the year for us to drive this route is in November or December.

Time for lunch next to Ol' Route 66

At lunchtime, a small truck stop was selected for us to pull off to one side to have our midday meal. There was a dirt and gravel overflow parking area that had a lot of room allowing me to make a big U-turn with our car following behind. I found that I spent a lot of time watching our car in the rearview monitor to see how it was towing. It would take a while for me to become accustomed to having our car in tow.

This stop was a restful break from being on the road. As I was finishing my sandwich, I saw Tom going for a walk down the road on Old Route 66. The Interstate has taken nearly all the traffic away from the historical highway. As a result, Tom was able to walk right down one of the old highway lanes in his quest for a little exercise.

Flowers next to Route 66

After completing my lunch, I went outside to see if I could find any photo ops. Even though we were in the Arizona desert, there were many plants growing on the side of the road. In fact, there were many bright yellow blooms that looked somewhat like sunflowers or daisies. I took a couple of pictures of the flowers when I saw what appeared to be small melons of some sort.

Tom was on his way back from his walk heading my way. As he approached, I told him of the vine with the small "melons." At first, I thought they might be stunted, green cantaloupes or maybe miniature watermelons. To satisfy my curiosity, I picked a couple of the little orbs to take back to the motorhome. I planned to cut them open to see what they were and to find out if they were ripe enough to eat.

A cluster of green orbs next to the highway

When I got back to the motorhome, I found a knife and began to cut one of the melons in half. I say, "I began to cut" because the round objects did not cut easy. I really had to bear down on the thing to get it open, so much for being ripe. Once open, it became apparent that the green spheres were really little gourds. Oh well.

As we drove back out on I-40, I called Tom on the CB radio and told him that my miniature melons turned out to be gourds. He responded by saying that he wished he had known that so he could have collected a few for Nora to use for seasonal decorations. To me, the gourd plants looked very much out of place out in the desert.

I thought we would be finding a place to stay, for the night, somewhere near Flagstaff east of town. However, we just kept driving and I was surprised to find us settling down for the night in Gallup, New Mexico. I recommended a place where Kay and I had stayed on past trips.

Our motorhome as seen by Tom and Nora — Photo by Nora

As it turned out the place I recommended, the Gallup KOA, was no longer affiliated with KOA. Knowing that I liked the campground, we went on in anyway. We found the place to be a very nice Good Sam RV campground. The air was cool and very comfortable. The campground has a new addition since we had stayed there on our previous trek, a small outdoor cafe operation where we decided to have our evening meal.

The sun sets on our second day on the road

When we entered New Mexico, we had crossed into a new time zone; the hour was later than we were used too. We all retired to our motorhomes where I set up a crab cleaning station for Kay. She was able to get all the crabs cleaned and the meat put in plastic bags. The bags were put in the freezer with the other bags of frozen crabmeat. We watched Monday night football to its conclusion before going to bed.

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