Been to Winslow, AZ lately?

Norma and I took one of our ruin-crawls through the Four Corners area on our vacation last October. We're deeply into the ancestral Pueblan culture and have made a number of trips through Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep and a bunch of the outliers. It's another one of those academic areas where most of what we know we learned in the last 25 years.

It's lovely country, but getting there and back eats up two days either way, Nevada is in the way, and there's no route we haven't taken a few times too many. And you've seen our little red roller skate. Not much of a highway cruiser.

It's usually my responsibility to find decent food on the road, which is a skill I picked up touring, and I'm the one who's usually saying, "I wonder where that road goes", or "I've never been to X. Let's have a look." Which is exactly what I said when we were tearing up I-40 headed towards Winslow, AZ.

When we got to the "Historic Downtown" area, it was apparent that Winslow used to be a lot bigger and a lot more prosperous. I mean, they were doing their best, but as with most of the other towns of the area, the interstate bypassed it, killing off the hotel and restaurant trade. "Downtown Winslow" is two blocks with a couple of gift shops, a couple of hotels and the civic buildings. So I mialed off some postcards and made friends with one of the postal clerks wo tipped me to a great Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks from there, we enjoyed a little bit of heaven topped with chile verde. And it meant walking through the two blocks of town.

The whole point of this post is that, right in the middle of town, there's a statue of a hitchhiker right on the corner, with a mural behind him of a blonde in a flatbed Ford, and across both streets, on each corner, is a gift shop selling souvenirs, with PA speakers outside playing the Eagles version of "Take it Easy" (over and over). Both shops obviously share the same playback system.

It's the "Standing on a corner" corner, and they have a Standing on the Corner Festival every year, with bands, rides, a parade, and everything. This is what it's come to in Winslow. I wonder if Jack knows.

Lest you think I'm kidding....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standin%27_on_the_Corner_Park