This place used to be a restaurant/hotel for visitors to stop at, now it is a little museum/gift shop called the Painted Desert Inn Museum.
The ceiling was super cool:
We were super hungry by this time and it was around 2 pm and getting hot so we were done. We didn't get randomly checked but we stopped at the big Visitor's Center for this end of the park, which was a mistake. It was packed! I am not sure where all these people came from since we definitely didn't see them out on the road or trails. There was a cafeteria type place but it was also packed and we really didn't feel like eating there, so we headed out in search of food and saw some more interesting stops along the road.
This place really scared me. You see the mannequin leg sticking out of the dinosaurs mouth? Well there was a ton of stuff like that. Against my better instincts we decided to drive up to check out the gift shop.
Yeah, there is definitely another mannequin inside this dinosaur's mouth. And all the mannequins seemed to be women....so yeah. Fun.
Not a good place to be a mannequin. Except for this one, who seemed to be the only one to conquer their dinosaur rather than be eaten:
All hail the victorious mannequin!
There was a pen full of ostriches next to the gift shop. I took one look at the gift shop and informed Brian that I was not in the mood to be murdered and have my skin removed to make a hat so we were leaving.
All of those other cars looked broken down. I'm sure they had belonged to other unwary tourists who stopped to pet the ostriches and ended up killed in numerous macabre ways...and there their cars sit to this day.
Being a man, and not as well informed as we women are of the serial killing nature of places such as this, he insisted on getting out of the car and taking pictures of the ostriches.
I promptly locked all the doors (sorry Brian, you took your chances) and nervously checked the place out while he snapped away.
There was a sign on the fence stating that you could feed the ostriches for $5. I had the sad thought that that might be the only time the poor ostriches got fed.
There was also a sign next to that stating that the ostriches were all for sale.
How do you like that for a souvenir? Just strap an ostrich to the roof and take it back to Ohio.
That one was friendly, should have grabbed him.
Brian had enough of his ostrich close up picture taking so I unlocked the doors for him and we were on our way.
We never did catch sight of the proprietor of that gift shop, I imagine he was in the shack out back sharpening his skin removal tools. I'm sure he had his eyes on us.
Dodged a bullet there.
We ended up going back through Holbrook and couldn't help but take a few more pictures.
We hadn't got a picture before of the street sign:
This apparently quite frequently makes lists of the oddest street names in America.
We did another gift shop stop, this one looked a lot more reputable than the last:
And yeah, we were starving and cranky at this point, but you can never be hungry enough not to go into a gift shop.
They were selling huge chunks of petrified wood for thousands of dollars.
They also had some shined up that could be used as tables, which looked lovely but were way out of the budget. Not to mention too big to go inside of the car. Guess it coulda gone on the roof with the ostrich.
We decided to head to Winslow to find some lunch (finally) since we had been told that Winston was also a good Route 66 town and it was only about 15 minutes away from Holbrook.
Along the way we saw some awesome signs for this Jack Rabbit place, which I later read are a Route 66 staple and inspirational to Lasseter as well.
We began to explore Winston and look for a place to eat. We finally ended up at a place called Casablanca (which I thought was named after the movie, I had no idea it was also Spanish for white house). It wasn't the best of places and wasn't really Route 66 themed so I was not pleased. I also am not the biggest fan of Mexican food so was slightly happy to see they had a hamburger on the menu.
Winston was pretty much a huge bust. We drove around for a while but didn't really see any cool Route 66 stuff. I would definitely recommend Holbrook over Winslow.
We really needed to head towards Sedona by now. We had our star gazing tour scheduled for tonight and we desperately needed to have some downtime at the hotel there.
But of course we got ensnared by the biggest tourist trap in the area...
to be continued!
next up: where we discover the 'biggest' tourist trap in the area!!