Life is a Journey: On To Tucumcari

From Holbrook, AZ we headed east on I40 crossing over into New Mexico. I had one more picture from the Painted Desert that I wanted to share. It shows petroglyphs on a rock that had been carved there by Native Americans around 1300 and later. The National Park sign posted this site as the Newspaper Rocks. As I stood there looking at them I wondered if these could have been political messages of the day. More likely they were crop reports, family comments, where to find water, etc.
You will probably have to click on the picture to enlarge it enough to see the petroglyphs.

Below is a monument to Route 66 in the Painted Desert close to I40. The road was actually a little to the left where the telephone poles remain with the wires stripped off long ago. The remnants of the road bed still remains also.

As we were heading into Albuquerque, NM we were looking for a place to make a rest stop when we noticed a sign for the Petroglyph National Monument. This National Monument is only about 6 miles north of I40 about in the center of town. The welcome center there is very nice and the rangers there are helpful in directing you to hiking trails that will take you to the petroglyph locations. You have to drive to get to some of the trails. We didn't take time to hike in to see the petroglyphs as we wanted to get a few more miles in before the end of the day. Below is the headquarters for the national monument welcome center.

As we headed east to Tucumcari Joan began telling about a trip that her family made by train to Arizona when she was 12 or 13 years old. As they were heading west the air conditioning broke down in the train car that they were riding in. It was in the summer and very hot so the train stopped in Tucumcari to try and make some repairs and give everyone a short break. They got off the train for a while and Joan and her cousin went and found some ice cream. We decided to try and find the station and see if it was still there.

We looked over a small town map that we had picked up somewhere and pinpointed where we thought the station should be and sure enough it was still there. Below is a photo of how it looks now. We concluded that the town was keeping it in enough repair to keep it from degrading but that's about it. It would seem that it would be a good setting for some type of business but it may be a little too far off the main highway to draw people. The architecture is beautiful and it would be a real shame to be torn down.