The road that drives though American culture

I am sitting at my hotel that is on route 66yes the famous road from Chicago to LA, that is a central story in 20th century American culture. Inspiring art and all sorts of songs (some of which aren’t even terrible). In the town of Flagstaff it looks like just another multi-lane road, but get out of town a bit and you see the amazing straight road disappearing out into the future in both directions, with thousands of trucks moving in both directions, it also has a train track alongside it with truly massive trains going pass it 70 times a day. Many people say that the road has lost it’s appeal now that it is just like other inter-state roads, but it still has a whole lot of unique (and usually tacky) road-side attractions and a fell all of it’s own).

On Sunday I went into town a decided to have a beer (or several) and watch the football. Now this is a very different experience from watching sport back home. Mostly there is just so much of it, for two games in a row there is 5-8 games on at the same time. So all of these games are on different TVs, and there is commentary that moves from one game to another when something is happening, lets just say it is takes some thinking to see all of this stuff happening and try and not miss too much (at one point I realized it was about 9am Monday morning back home, at that point I was pretty happy to be where I was )

Yesterday I went on a trip out into the Arizona desert. The first stop was a Meteor Crater (This being America it is not ‘a’ Meteor crater but simply ‘meteor crater’) This is the best preserved impact creator on the planet it is about 1.2km wide and could fit a 70 story building inside it. It is impressive to be inside something like this with the walls completely intact so you have walls around you for 360 degrees. This is so well setup that Apollo astronauts came here to train before going to the moon and it really does have a other worldly fell to it.

We then went off to the painted desert national park, the park has two different attractions. The first5 is the painted desert area, which is a desert area (imagine that) which has quite amazing stator of different colors. It goes out as far as you can see with all of the land at given highest being the same color, which is quite hard to get your heard around but is quite quite impressive. Further into the park there are large deposits of petrified wood, this is where ancient logs have been filled with silica and turned into wood. Now I have seen petrified wood down in the Catlins, but these are really large logs and they have amazing colors in them which makes this very impressive to see. The park also has some 1,000 or so old Native American buildings it is amazing to think that people lived in this very though environments for generations.