Standing on the corner....

We started our day with a few iconic shots from Holbrook's Route 66.  The Wigwam Motel is especially cool.  The dinosaur rock shop and the wigwams were framed and displayed at the Desert Inn out in the Painted Desert area.  Once I saw them there, I couldn't resist taking my own pictures of them before leaving Holbrook.  Our next stop, as you see above, was Winslow. Not much reason to go there except to pose for a picture. I also got the t-shirt, which I'm wearing today, so you will see pictures of it tomorrow.  Yesterday I was wearing my Tombstone shirt again.

Then we had one of the longest drives on the trip.  A bridge has recently collapsed on the main road in to Page, and there aren't many ways around it.  The detour added about 60 miles to the trip. It was pretty beautiful, but it was also gray and rainy all day.  Stopping at the Cameron Trading Post, about 20 miles south of Tuba City, was fun.  It has grown from literally just a trading post in the early 1900s along the Colorado River gorge to a store, art gallery, restaurant, and hotel.  We saw online that they had Navajo Fry Bread, which I've been wanting to try.  Here they make it into a giant vegetarian Navajo taco, which was more like a salad on top of the bread.  It included refried beans, regular beans, large quantities of shredded cheese and lettuce, chopped green chili, and spicy salsa.  We should have ordered only one and split it because it was huge. I hate about 2/3 of it.  Unfortunately, I also ordered the Prickly Pear Cactus Milkshake.  Come on!  Who wouldn't want that?  I only drank about 1/3 of it though.  It was delicious, but mostly just tasted like a strong vanilla.

Beautiful tin ceiling in the restaurant

The trading post was right on the river gorge.

Then we finished the drive up to Lake Powell.  It's a man made lake, created in the 1950s when Glen Canyon Dam was built on the Colorado River.  Mark wanted to visit this place because it's the home of Lee's Ferry, originally a crossing point for the river from AZ to UT.  John D. Lee constructed the first ferry across the Colorado River at that point, now called Lee's Ferry, in 1872, under the direction of Brigham Young.  Once it was established, it became part of the Honeymoon Trail, which is the tour we are on.  Mormon couples who married in Arizona, many of whom had settled between here and Holbrook, were required to return to Utah to file the marriage with the church.  Obviously, a safe river crossing was necessary. Now it's the starting point for a lot of Colorado River tours and the point from which all measurements on the Colorado River begin.  Turns out it is not that close to where we are, so we're not actually going there.  As we were driving the 280 miles from Holbrook to Lake Powell, which took us about 6 hours, we joked that those couples must have had six kids by the time they got to Utah to file that marriage license!  Overland by horse or wagon would have taken a long time.

We drove over the dam and out to the Lake Powell Resort and Marina for dinner in their Rainbow Room.  It has a wall of windows overlooking the lake.  It's beautiful.  The lake is HUGE and mostly in Utah.  I wish I could have taken one of the cruises in the lake, but it's just not going to work out for us.  We want to visit the Powell Museum, all about John Wesley Powell.  Disney made a movie about him going down the Colorado River.  It was called Ten Who Dared.  That's about all we know of him, so I bet we learn a lot more in the museum today.  I'm also going to the Glen Canyon Dam Visitor's Center.  It's a national park!  I didn't know that, so I'll be getting another passport stamp today.

All this will be done by lunch time because we have another long drive back over the same roads today, ending in the Grand Canyon Railroad Hotel in Williams.  Tomorrow we take the historic train up to the Grand Canyon!  Wow!  I can't believe it, but this trip is almost over.

Sea bass on mashed potatoes and broccolini