Day 8 - Adobe to Prehistoric

Paul Mullan
Apr 29, 2017
2 min read

The morning was spent roaming around Santa Fe, the capital of adobe architecture in USA and home to many significant buildings including the spiral staircase built without nails and the oldest house in the country.

There's also an abundance of wonderful art of all sorts from the usual tourist prepared pendants to significant pieces of work that could set you back a small house (well, maybe not in Auckland or Sydney!)

We ran down the old road which eventually became the 57 and turned left onto the i40.

The late start on the road meant a late lunch and that was at The Comet II in Santa Rosa. Third generation Johnny Martinez is still proudly running the family Mexican restaurant with two further generations keeping the family name alive - seems to be the way out here.

The Route 66 Car Museum in the same town got a good review from this group, an small eclectic collection of cars and associated memorabilia

that struck the right cord. A couple of the girls got roped into a photo shoot for a local advertising campaign!

We slipped through the tight tunnel under the i40 as the old road crossed from side to side.

Once again the remnants of the interstate literally splitting small communities and rendering them defunct, are scattered across New Mexico.

The only development for many many decades is the natural decay of deserted buildings.

Decay was not an issue at the Mesalands Community College Museum in Tucumcari where passionate curator Axel gave us tour of his laboratory and the painstaking work he does to find and preserve dinosaur bones.

A trip on Route 66 just wouldn't be the same without a stay at the old Blue Swallow Motel, so we settled in down the road for a quiet drink and reminisce about the trip so far.