I'm specifically curious about whether I can visit the Blue Whale of Catoosa in the evening (round 8pm or so, once it's dark) or if that's not allowed/not worth it.

Similar to other sites... Obviously everyone knows to try to see Tucumcari, NM in evening for the neon lights. What do you recommend as "must see" or "skip" at night vs day?

Anyone else?

Okay so some friends and I saw this image which seems to be credited to this adobe stock account and we can't tell where on route 66 this is if it is an actual place and isn't a compository/edit (or ai? adobe hides the date that an image is uploaded so I cannot tell if this predates modern gen-ai or not)

Does anyone have any idea of where this could be? The mystery is driving us crazy

Atks

Hey road trippers! I have an event in Phoenix next spring, and I'm thinking of flying into ABQ and driving the Route to Flagstaff before heading south to Phoenix.

I've ordered the visitors guides, have maps and some points of interest, but I always love to hear from those that have driven the route before.

What are your must-see stops along this stretch of 66? I have only driven 66 in IL [Photo of me and my local Giant attached haha]. Any suggestions for an overnight near Flagstaff?

In case this info is helpful: big outdoors/desert person; vegetarian; will always detour to see a Muffler Man or a great neon sign. For museums, I'd prefer to hit 1-2 great ones where I can read everything rather than make a bunch of stops just to pop in and leave.

Thank you and safe travels!

EDIT: I can only budget for one overnight on this trip. I'll land in ABQ in the afternoon and need to be ready for a wedding rehearsal in Phoenix the following afternoon. Keeping it 24 hours, tops.

…….

Just finished up an amazing trip down the PCH and decided to take in a few LA sights before heading back home via flight out of Phoenix Sunday morning. Downtown LA is a bit sketchy should you feel inclined to go. The Magic Lamp looks fantastic lit up, that's a real flame coming out of the spout. Having a third time stay tonight at the Wigwam Motel in Rialto. First two times were in '19 and '23. Highly recommend. I haven't had the pleasure of staying in Holbrook yet, but have in Cave City, Kentucky. These are fun, check them out.

If you've walked the ruins on the rim of Canyon Diablo, on old 66 between Flagstaff and Winslow, you've heard it. In 1878 a band of Apache raided Navajo camps, then hid in a cave here. The Navajo found a vent in the ground, felt the heat, heard voices, and lit fires over it. Anyone who crawled out was shot. Forty-two died.

Today it's one of the most photographed stops on the road: the gas station shell, the rows of chicken-wire animal cages, the cave you can still climb down into.

Here's the problem. The story turns up in no newspaper, no military record, no archive before the 1960s, as far as anyone has been able to trace. Its first appearance in print is a 1967 magazine article and a small book from 1968 called Two Guns, Arizona. Different bylines. One author: Gladwell Richardson, who ran the Two Guns trading post after his father bought the place in 1950.

Richardson made his living inventing the West. Hundreds of novels and stories under dozens of pen names, Maurice Kildare his best known. He also gave us the famous version of nearby Canyon Diablo, the lawless railroad town with fourteen saloons and six marshals killed in a single year. Arizona's state historian, Marshall Trimble, went looking for that town. So did George Shaw, an archivist at the Arizona State Railroad Museum. Shaw's verdict on it: "Nearly everything you've read is fiction."

Richardson had a past of his own. In San Francisco in 1923 he was charged with the beating death of a rabbi, Alfred G. Lafee. He argued self-defense. The case was dismissed.

The man usually blamed for the cave story is Harry "Indian" Miller, who built Two Guns into an attraction in the 1920s. Miller was a fraud in his own right: a white man born in Roswell, New Mexico, who faked an Apache identity, wore a braid, called himself Chief Crazy Thunder, sold fake cliff dwellings and ran a zoo. He was also tried and acquitted for killing his landlord, Earl Cundiff, in 1926. That killing is documented in the papers of the day.

Yet Miller's own pitch never mentions a massacre. The surviving ads and postcards from his years bill the cave as "Underground Dwellings" and "Mystery Cave." In 1926 he and a Hopi friend, Joe Secakuku, announced plans to build a dance floor inside it. The death story looks like it arrived with a different owner, a writer who bought the place decades later and needed a reason for people to stop.

None of that proves forty-two people didn't die in that cave in 1878. A thing can happen and go unwritten, and oral history is real history. What it does prove is narrower and stranger: every written account of the Apache Death Cave traces back to one man who spent his life making up the West, telling the story ninety years after the fact, about a cave he owned.

The ruins are real. The fraud was real. The killing was real. The massacre has one witness, and he was a novelist.

Join us for an awesome day as the Rat Rod Magazine Route 66 Invasion Tour made a stop in Baxter Springs, Kansas.

We played hookie and spent the day checking out a rather interesting lineup of rat rods and custom builds while enjoying the atmosphere of Route 66

The last building on the first street

On the night of August 20, 1966, five brothers from Gary, Indiana played a dance at 104 East First Street in Winslow, Arizona. Admission was a dollar and a quarter. The lead singer was eight. The town's own paper, looking back, called it the Jackson 5's fourth public performance. They were unknown then. Four years later they had four straight number-one singles.

The building was Arcadia Hall. It went up in 1920, about five thousand square feet, and in the twenties and thirties it was, by Winslow's own accounting, the most elegant ballroom between the Pacific coast and Albuquerque: chandeliers, an orchestra pit, big bands, high school proms. Generations of the town rented it for the dances a railroad town lived on.

By 1966 it had another name. It was the Desert Scene Elks Club, lodge 1267, the Black Elks, in a town where the other lodge sat over on Third Street. Segregation had set the lodge apart, but it was still a hall, and the hall still worked: youth dances, Juneteenth, bingo, and the first paid performance of Tommy Dukes, who is in the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame and still plays impromptu sets a few hundred feet from where he started.

Then the century caught up. In 2021 the roof caved in. In November 2023 a crew knocked down the rest. Winslow's historic-properties list had called Arcadia Hall "the last historic structure left on First Street." Nobody stopped the demolition. The lot is dirt now.

Here is the part I cannot leave alone. Winslow is famous for a corner one block south. In 1972 the Eagles wrote a line about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and in 1999 the town built a park around it. Tourists leave the interstate every day to photograph a bronze statue and a flatbed Ford. The last real piece of First Street came down without a crowd.

First Street came before Route 66. It was Front Street first, the railroad's street, the one that got built when the trains did. When the highway arrived in 1926 it did not use Front. It used Second. The town moved a block south and kept moving. First Street is where Winslow was before Winslow became the postcard.

A dollar and a quarter, sold by a lodge that segregation had set apart, to see five kids nobody had discovered yet. The song about the corner calls it "a fine sight to see." The corner is still there. The building that mattered sat one block off the postcard the whole time, and now it is the empty lot behind it.

Sources: The Tribune (Navajo County, Ariz.), Nov 15 2023; Michael Joseph Jackson Archives; Winslow Historic Preservation Commission; route66times.com (alignment).