Albuquerque, New Mexico - Holbrook, Arizona
We wasted most of the morning (by which I mean 11AM when we left the motel until 2PM...) looking into fixing the computer - finally abandoning the idea. Laptops, they're portable but proprietary.
The other reason there aren't many pictures is that we want to get to Las Vegas by Tuesday at the latest, to avoid weekend hotel rates, so we've been tearing across Arizona and the rest of New Mexico. We'll be loopingback around after Las Vegas, and taking time to enjoy Arizona properly.
One of the last sights before the Arizona border was the Continental Divide: the watershed line for the Atlantic and Pacific. It's not much to see - just a sign on the roadside - but it's a sign we're making progress.
In Grants, we stopped for lunch at Pizza hut. The verdict: almost identical to British Pizza Hut, but more generous with the toppings, and with the extra base option of "hand rolled").
Sated, we moved on to Grants' uranium mining museum. It turns out that Grants has been a logging community, a railroad community, a vegetable farming community (at one point the world's greatest carrot producer, although I'll have something to say about Grants' superlatives in a moment), and then in the 40s and 50s a uranium mining community. After 5 mile island, the bottom kind of dropped out of the uranium mining business, and now Grants looks to tourism for its money.
The museum was excellent - they hve a lift which takes you down to a mocked up mine exhibit. The video they show you at the end, though, claims that it is the only mining museum in the world (there's that superlative I warned you about) -- I know of three in Wales alone (Llywernog, Dolaucothi and Big Pit -- a silver/lead mine, a gold mine and a coal mine respectively) -- not to mention the working gold mine in Thunder Mountain at Disneyland.
Zooming through Arizona, we passed all kinds of promising attractions, and noted them for our next pass of this stretch. We stuck to the Interstate for speed, and didn't cover much of Route 66.
In Holbrook we stopped for the night at... the Wigwam Motel! So here we are, spending the night in a [bricks and mortar] wigwam! Holbrook appears to be entirely devoted to such magnificent tourist tat.
Steak for tea again. It's silly not to.