It was a clear, sunny day (although still cold!) and we managed to get a little sunburnt in the car.
We rolled into Roswell in the evening and bartered with couple of hotels before settling on a Motel6 for a bargain $49. We walked to the highly recommended Mexican restaurant for a very delicious mexican feast and drinks. Yum! Lucy had a mix plate of enchalada, tamale and taco with sides of refried beans and rice with some seriously spicy green sauce and Darren had mild chicken fajitas. It was great to be able to walk back to the motel and not drive - i think that's the one thing that's hard about the US - you have to drive everywhere!
The next morning we put on our alien fact finding hats and headed to the International UFO Museum. Roswell as a town goes gung-ho for everything alien since the infamous 'Roswell incident' in the 50's. The museum was far more factually balanced than we thought it would be - presenting all the options for how the 'ufo' remnants could have got there (and been covered up).
Roswell was only a short visit, so we jumped in the car for the journey to Flagstaff (near the Grand Canyon). We wanted to include a drive on some of the original parts of the famous Route 66 as it correlated roughly with the way we were going on this trip.
Well, Route 66 was great - stunning scenery, narrow road and curves around big red deserty hills. It was like a desert race track and had hardly any other cars. We then skirted the Freeway on Route 66 for a while before realizing it was was getting dark, fast. We still had 3 hours to get to Flagstaff and it was a light-less freeway and very unhelpful cats eyes on the road, with some roadworks thrown in for fun. We also realized that we were getting to see such awesome scenery when we were driving in the light, it would be such a shame to miss out on the scenery while driving at night, so we decided to stop in a town called Gallup just outside Navajo Nation Indian reservation. We had picked up a voucher book at a petrol station and there were 'deals' for motels on the Route 66 bit of Gallup - so we headed there. Well. Deals they were not - every motel said they either 'didn't have any of those rate rooms left' or that there was some additional charge. I think we got further in previous towns by just bargaining them down rather than trying to use a voucher. We went for a Travelodge which was the cheapest motel we'd found to date - $39 + tax for the night. And to our delight they even had a laundry room - yippee! - we could clean some clothes!
We went searching for a restaurant and to our dismay, discovered that all the incredibly cool, retro, original Route 66 motels were just down the road. We had been allured by the voucher book to the area of Gallup with all the soulless chain motels, when if we'd driven around we could have found $25/night retro flouro glamour motels!
We went for dinner at one of the more famous Route 66 motel/hotel/restaurants - El Rancho, which was full of antiques and pictures of all the famous Western movies and their stars that had stayed/filmed there. We had grilled fish and a local beer as we were started to feel a little poisoned by all the fast food we were eating on the road, and then headed back to the motel to do some washing.
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