Welcome to Day 3 of our Route 66 journey. Today we’re leaving the pine forests of Flagstaff and heading east to Albuquerque, with a lot of open country and a few wonderfully strange roadside surprises in between. We’ll pass Winona, a tiny place made famous by the Route 66 song. We’ll find dinosaurs at Meteor City, a corner immortalized in another song in Winslow, and the colorful hills of the Painted Desert. If you have extra time, Meteor Crater and Petrified Forest National Park make remarkable detours. Then we’ll cross into New Mexico, where Gallup, Grants, and the communities of Laguna Pueblo add new stories to the road. We’ll drive surviving sections of historic Route 66 where they fit our route and use Interstate 40 to connect them. Some of the best moments today are small ones: an old sign, a quiet trading post, or a bend in the road that still feels much as it did decades ago. Take your time. Albuquerque will be there when we arrive.
