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Neliza Drew

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Neliza Drew

Tag Archives: national park

Road Trippin’ SAT-to-SAN episode 5

06 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by nelizadrew in Recipes, Travel

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Tags

arizona, camping, desert, grand canyon, holbrook, mather, national park, navajo fry bread, painted, parks, petrified forest, recipe, road trip, sat-to-san, tori amos, winslow

We woke up at the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, AZ. I have to admit that I love the Wigwam Motel and I have since before I stayed there the first time back in 2001. It’s kitschy and historical and small and inexpensive and clean and surrounded by antique cars — it checks off so many things on ideal-place-to-stay list. Yes, I realize a lot of people want room service or an infinity pool or a fitness room and all that’s great for a resort or a conference hotel, but road trip? I’m all about the cheap, cool spots.

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The Wigwam Motel and Historic 66 and all the accompanying stuff are about 18 miles or a half hour drive from the Petrified Forest National Park. The northern end of the Petrified Forest starts the Painted Desert and part of it is included in the park (or a separate but attached wilderness area, if you want to get technical). I think most people come into the park(s) from the northern end through the Painted Desert Visitor Center. It has the restaurant, the bigger visitor area, gift shops. The entry lanes are bigger, too, and it’s closest to the interstate. I have to recommend, though, if you can come in from the southern end of the park in the morning, it’s pretty great.

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I’m not a fan of big crowds and the southern end is less crowded so you get the chance to walk among the large petrified logs with fewer people, explore a little more. And as you pass through the Badlands and on to the Painted Desert, you get some incredible, almost surprise, vistas.

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At the marker for where the old Route 66 once passed through the National Park

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Plus, if you’ve stayed in Holbrook the night before, you can have a late lunch in the restaurant on the northern end after your exploring. Or, at least that’s what we ended up doing. For the record, not a lot of vegetarian options, but everyone recommends the Navajo Taco, which you can get without meat or cheese. That basically turns it into an iceberg and tomato salad on Navajo bread but the bread is filling enough. (And fattening aplenty!)

Recipe for Navajo Fry Bread, which evolved out of the mid-1800s when about 8000 Navajo were basically held prisoner at Fort Sumner, NM with little more than flour and lard to eat. It’s considered disrespectful to turn down fry bread if it’s offered to you by a traditional family.

5 cups of flour
2 tablespoons of baking powder
2 tablespoons of salt
2 cups of lukewarm water (not too hot, not too cold)
1.5 cups corn or canola oil
cast iron skillet

Mix up everything but the oil until the dough is “fluffy.” Put the oil in a skillet and heat until a pinch of dropped dough floats instead of sinking. Flatten out balls of dough (think fair food elephant ears) and fry until golden.

Back out on the road, we headed for Winslow, AZ. Winslow’s claim to fame is that certain Eagles’ song. I’ve heard that song like every good Southern Girl who’s ever been to any event mixing their “butt rock” (friend’s term for Southern Rock, 70s quasi-folk bands, and early pop-y hair bands) with country (the pre-Garth Brooks kind). The lyric just never resonated with me in the Eagles’ song. No, all my Winslow associations come courtesy of Tori Amos being “in the wrong song.” (Yes, I totally made the husband listen to a CD with “Springtime of His Voodoo” on it a few dozen times between Holbrook and Winslow. And, yes, now I’ve guaranteed none of you will want to road trip with me.)

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Standin' on a corner…

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 7, 2013 at 1:08pm PDT

There’s also a really cool old couple of train cars in a park a few blocks from “The Corner” if you have time to poke around town.

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From Winslow, we headed west to the Grand Canyon. Now, unlike Episode 3‘s trip from Van Horn to Santa Rosa, which Google had estimated taking just over 8 hours, including a detour we didn’t take, or Episode 4‘s batshit drive time of an estimated 11.5 hours, not including the absurd detours, the trip from Holbrook, through the Petrified Forest and up to the Grand Canyon via Highways 89 and 64 (East Rim Drive), was only supposed to take about five hours. Note, when planning a road trip, don’t plan to drive more than five hours a day unless you’re a long-haul trucker who plans to see the sites while peeing in a bottle at 70mph.

Five hours was even reasonable enough that we pulled over at Sunset Crater and took some pictures, stretched our legs, that sort of thing. Imagine! And it would still be daylight when we got to our destination!

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2013-07-06_15-58-21_341Well, sort of. Note the storm clouds in that second picture up there. The first time I saw the Grand Canyon was in 2001 and I was on a road trip with a friend who might have at some point in Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ decided that I was as insane as my husband decided around Santa Rosa and certainly knew by the time we drove through a canyon on Indian Service Rte 9 southwest of Pueblo Pintado at dusk.

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Along the comparably smaller canyon on Hwy 89, there are usually stalls with vendors selling food and jewelry, but the weather was so bad none of them were really staffed. Driving along East Rim, the view was amazing, but by the time we got to the visitor center it was drizzling rain and cold. (Summer doesn’t find the Grand Canyon quite the same way it finds Fort Lauderdale or Van Horn.)

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First view of the Grand Canyon.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 7, 2013 at 1:23pm PDT

At the next overlook, we stopped and too photos, explored a little and got back to the rental car as it started thundering. At which point we discussed our sleeping options for the night since we had a campsite booked at Mather Campground and, it being early July, every hotel room was booked in Grand Canyon Village, Tusayan, Williams, probably even Flagstaff. Not good. Especially after the crazy drive the day before. We wanted to get somewhere and eat and get a good night’s sleep.

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Grand Canyon. #nofilter

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 7, 2013 at 1:50pm PDT

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About an hour before sunset. #grandcanyon

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 7, 2013 at 1:54pm PDT

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Tiny white flowers.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 7, 2013 at 1:58pm PDT

We decided to drive into Grand Canyon Village and play it by ear and by the time we got into the Village the weather was clearing so we headed over to the campground to check out the situation. Now, if you remember me saying how early I booked our site at Santa Rosa in Episode 2, you should guess I booked the campsite at Mather about eight months before the trip. When I booked, I had a pretty good choice of spaces and I’d picked on near a restroom and not too far from the showers at the entrance to the campground. When we got there, the place was booked solid. Full. I don’t mean full in a small campground kind of way. I mean, full in that the number residents of Mather on any given summer night might be higher than the population of the town I grew up in. Score on my spot picking.

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We cooked some dinner, relaxed, and talked about driving back over to the rim to check it out, but ultimately decided we’d sat on the rim at night and listened to the wildlife and seen the bats and as awesome as that was, we were exhausted. Plus, Mather isn’t terribly close to a good overlook unless you’re in the mood to drive or really put in a long walk.

Road Trippin’ SAT-to-SAN episode 3

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by nelizadrew in Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

camping, carlsbad, caverns, dashboard cooking, driving, guadalupe mountains, hiking, national park, new mexico, road trip, roswell, santa rosa, sat-to-san, texas, travel

We woke up and ate in Van Horn because even people with a cooler (and two bags) full of food don’t turn away from free continental breakfast. Well, he didn’t. (I brought my own high-protein bagel and vegan cream cheese in to toast and spread while he ate danishes and Texas-shaped waffles.

We explored Van Horn a bit, admired the awesome signage a bit longer, and headed north to Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

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Cactus with El Capitan in the Guadeloupe Mountains. #elcapitan #guadeloupemountains #nationalparks

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 4:18pm PDT

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Happy 4th. At Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 4:36pm PDT

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Life in the desert.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 4:24pm PDT

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We went for a brief hike, ate some dashboard burritos, and headed on up the road to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Where Guadalupe was hot and dusty except for a small spring, the Caverns are cool and damp (and crowded that time of year). If you wanted to take long-exposure photos, linger on the footpaths, or do some of the more hardcore tours, I’d recommend winter, a part of winter when everyone else is working or in school. Still, pretty awesome stuff.

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Carlsbad Caverns.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 5:50pm PDT

By the time we got back on the surface, it was already getting late. Like dinnertime late, but we still had too many miles to drive to get to our next stay (camping at Santa Rosa State Park), so we grabbed some plain baked potatoes from a Wendy’s to add our own cheese and salsa to when we stopped again and headed on northward.

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The aliens have landed! #sponsoredbyroswellchamberofcommerce

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 6:26pm PDT

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#roswell

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 6:33pm PDT

In Roswell, we stopped at a grocery store for a couple of supplies, waited in maddening Fourth of July cookout-supply crowds, and stopped at a rest area just north of there to eat and watch the sun set.

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Setting sun. #nofilter

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 4, 2013 at 6:39pm PDT

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On the road to Santa Rosa, we caught the town fireworks show and once we rolled into town, it seemed we may have missed a parade. Cute little town, but also had a worn, sort of sad look. Then, we only really caught the parts along Route 66 before we headed up to the park so maybe we missed the shiny sections. Still, you know how I like dusty.

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It wasn’t exactly easy getting the tent set up in the dark. All the other campers were settled in for the night, though the group at the RV across the lane from us played music on a small radio well into the night. Still, we used the headlights sparingly because we didn’t want to disturb anyone and flashlights are only so bright. If we hadn’t owned that tent for more than a decade and set the thing up in all sorts of places over the years, I don’t imagine we’d have managed to get it put together, the air mattress blown up, and everything else put away as tired as we were.

Sunrise made it all worth it, though. Totally gorgeous. The state park spot cost us about $20 and the park had showers and flush toilets. (If you aren’t familiar with the lingo, vault toilets are the kind that are essentially a hole in the ground with a porta-potty style seat and maybe sanitizer dispensers in lieu of sinks and running water.) If I’m out camping or hiking or something for a few days, I’m fine with peeing in the woods, vault toilets, and not showering, but since we planned to be in the car, stopping at various places some of which would be around other, non hikers, showering was kind of a must. My hair in humid climates is bridge-troll greasy eight hours after I’ve washed it. For some bizarre reason, desert climates make it even greasier.

I picked our camp spot when I paid almost a year before the trip. At the time, we were one of three campers booked for the night. By the time we got there to set up, the park was full. If we hadn’t had a reservation, we’d have been out of luck. As it was, because I booked so early, we got a great spot!

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Road Trippin’ SAT-to-SAN episode 4

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by nelizadrew in Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

arizona, broken saddle, cerrillos, chaco, chaco canyon, chaco culture, driving, holbrook, horseback riding, national park, new mexico, road trip, santa fe, santa rosa, sat-to-san, travel, wigwam motel

This was the day I may have both overestimated how long we could stay away, how well New Mexico maintains their roads, and how how good the paper maps I had would be if we found ourselves without service. (spoiler alert: this is the day that nearly killed us.)

We woke up in Santa Rosa State Park at a time that I’d ordinarily classify as “ungodly” but since we were still on East Coast time only seemed slightly deranged. We showered, packed up everything and ate a snack as we drove to Santa Fe where we picked up tofu scramble burittos to go. Yes, I drove all the way to Santa Fe for tofu scramble. No, that didn’t seem weird at the time.

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Waiting for totu scramble… Chocolate Maven Bakery & Cafe.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 5, 2013 at 12:44pm PDT

From there, we drove back south to Cerrillos in time for horseback riding at Broken Saddle. I highly recommend Broken Saddle. Good horses, knowledgeable staff who took no shit when it came to the safety of their horses and riders.

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Broken Saddle. (This place was awesome!) We went riding up in the neighboring state park. #brokensaddle #horseback #nm #santafe #cerrillos #loscerrillos #riding

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 6, 2013 at 12:33am PDT

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Guide, Steph's horse.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 6, 2013 at 12:53am PDT

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Saddle up.

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 6, 2013 at 12:56am PDT

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From there, it was down to Albuquerque and then back up to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. They are not kidding about having paper maps handy. I’d printed maps for all our planned routes, the “doodle” of a map on the NHP site, and had a road atlas with us. None of those helped when the rental car got stuck on the road we’d planned to leave on and we had to backtrack to some other road that dumped us out in Istilldon’tknowville. None of the places we’d been were on the maps with enough detail to figure out where exactly we were. (Should’ve brought a topo map. Had one for AZ and NV, but… live and learn and bring a topographical map if you plan to drive that far off a beaten path.) When we finally picked up a bit of signal on his phone, Apple Maps suggested we take “Road of the Ancients” a potentially-neverending dirt path out into the desert after dark. (Pro tip: Don’t listen to Apple Maps.) We decided to keep going on the highway because I had a hunch cobbled from five different paper maps that we’d come up on an intersection to civilization shortly. We did!


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Chaco Culture, if you have the maps and enough food and water in case maps and autos fail you, is unreal. I’m not a terribly spiritual person. I commune more with nature than anything else but I have to say that place had a vibe most places don’t. It’s isolated, it’s old, and the rocks have a quality that’s solid yet fragile, precarious but sturdy, hard with soft organic lines. I kind of wish we’d planned to spend the night there, but the park lacks showers and I’m not a fan of spending long days in the car with two people who were horseback riding and hiking and haven’t bathed in two days.

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Chaco Culture NHP. #nationalparks #ruins

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 6, 2013 at 6:15am PDT

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I had intended for us to take Hwy 57 (Hwy 14 on some maps because why?) out of Chaco Culture. It was supposed to be 20 miles of dirt to Hwy 57 that, roughly 13 miles, later turned into Hwy 9 and connected to Hwy 371, which would dump us onto I-40. Except about 5 miles down the rutted, dirt road, we ran into a spot of soft sand with no way to get around it (trust me, we tried everything including building part of a road out of slate). After way too much effort trying to get past the soft spot, we turned around and went back to the main road and tried the other southern way out of the park. Option 2 included about 33 miles of dirt spread in chucks that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown expecting the next patch of dirt to be the one that got us stuck in the middle of nowhere. We made it to Pueblo Pintado (I guess) as it was getting dark and came to an intersection of Indian Service Roads that weren’t labeled. We picked one way, drove far enough to decide we’d gone the wrong way, and tried the other way. (No phone service out there and none of the maps were helping because without a topo or a street sign or even a school with a town name, we had no way of knowing where we were.)

What I’m saying is: A) I’m insane in that I think an 11.5-hour-drive day with iffy roads is a good idea and B) bring a topo map or a satellite GPS and/or a 4×4 if you go to Chaco.

Here’s something people just don’t tell you about New Mexico, but it’s something you should know if you’re used to driving in places that aren’t New Mexico. New Mexico isn’t crazy about highway reflectors — not even on the interstate — and they have a eh, maybe not attitude toward lights. Yet, their interstate winds around some mountains and over bridges and generally seems way more dangerous than the interstate in say, Florida (well, subtracting those people texting while driving rented Masaratis) or North Carolina (wannabe NASCAR drivers aside), or California (well, maybe not counting those people around L.A. who can’t merge). If you’re sleepy and not from there, it pretty much seems like skydiving while twirling fire.

But, we made it to Holbrook, Arizona. Fun Fact you know you’re in Arizona even if someone steals the big welcome sign because suddenly there are reflectors. (Seriously, don’t drive in New Mexico at night unless you’re a native. Part of their plan is to send the tourists right into a ravine.)

Why Holbrook? Because Holbrook is home to one of the Wigwam Motels, which is a charming little place to stay. If you have kids (or adults) in your party who’ve seen Cars, the Wigwam Motel looks like the little tee pee motel the cars stayed in. Each hotel room is its own giant concrete tee pee and they have their original furnishings (new bedding). In front of each “wigwam” and scattered throughout the property is the owner’s antique car collection and for a clean place to stay, it’s hard to beat the price. (We paid about $45.)

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So, have you slept in a wigwam (okay, they're concrete teepees) lately? #wigwammotel #holbrook #az #route66

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 6, 2013 at 7:39am PDT

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Inside the wigwam. #wigwammotel #holbrook #route66

A post shared by Neliza Drew (@nelizadrew) on Jul 6, 2013 at 8:06am PDT

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Holbrook is also about a half an hour from the entrance to the Petrified Forest National Park and Historic Route 66 runs right through it. (Guess where we’re starting off episode 5.)

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