A Skeptical Teenager’s Transformation

I was a skeptical teenager when I moved to the United States. Having grown up all over the world, I was initially unimpressed by America’s cultural influence. However, soon after arriving in Detroit, the birthplace of the American automobile industry, I learned how to drive. The rush I got behind the wheel helped me understand the American obsession with freedom.

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I vividly remember taking my friend John’s teal 1977 Ford pickup for a spin, feeling the rumble of the car as I drove it barefoot through the sticky heat of an Ann Arbor summer. It was exhilarating, and I felt like I could go anywhere, do anything.

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A Love Affair with Road Trips

Over the decades, I’ve fallen in love with discovering the US by road. I’ve woken up next to a lake in rural Washington, partaken in homemade rum in a parking lot in Alpine, Texas, and frequently driven sections of Route 66, the fabled highway from Chicago to my home in LA.

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Its mythology has been immortalized throughout pop culture, and I welcomed it into my family with the Disney/Pixar film Cars, which I’ve watched with my kids countless times. Now, as the interstate approaches its 100th anniversary, I’m curious to explore the little stretch from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, that I have still yet to see.

Exploring the Little-Known Route

I meet my friend John for lunch at all-day café Sosta in Flagstaff. Enchanted by the outdoors, he’s lived here for five years. I get why, I tell him. A couple of years ago, during a road trip in the Southwest, the Grand Canyon changed my life.

My sometimes still-foreign self thought it was going to be just a big hole in the ground. Then I spent seven hours marveling at it from every angle. “Yeah,” John says before we part, “that’s basically why I live here.”

My first stop, a 10-minute drive away, is Walnut Canyon National Park, which contains cave dwellings built between 1100 and 1400 by the Sinagua people, a pre-Columbian group of hunter-gatherers who predate the 13 Native tribes currently associated with the region.

As I hike past these magnificently preserved sites, I wonder why we’re talking about America’s 250th birthday this year as though people haven’t been living on this land for millennia. Thirty minutes later I’m still pondering this expanse of time—driving by a rust red field of stones, the blazing orange mesa in the distance—when I pull up to Barringer Crater, the result of a meteorite impact 50,000 years ago.

It can hold 20 football fields with 2 million spectators, says the informational video playing on loop in the visitor center. I stand on its lip, and my brain refuses to accept the size.

It’s hard to conceive there could be anything beyond this place, yet the town of Winslow is close by. Yes, the place Glenn Frey name-checks in the Eagles hit “Take It Easy,” which became a piece of Route 66 history.

A steady stream of travelers stop to take photos at a downtown corner marked with plaques and brass statues commemorating the song.

A Journey Through Time

Winslow’s La Posada Hotel, a beautifully restored building from 1930, is my pit stop for the night. It’s home to a delightful museum about Fred Harvey, the hospitality magnate who built the property, which also houses the world’s largest Diné rug: Diyogí Tsoh, or The Big Rug.

Commissioned in 1932, it’s made with hand-carded, -dyed, and -spun wool from Navajo-Churro sheep, a breed that, around the time, was being slaughtered by the US government due to overgrazing, subsequently sending many Diné farmers into poverty.

I study the pattern, which includes the Milky Way and horned toads, and am struck by the care taken to not only make the rug but preserve it.

Before checking out the next morning, I grab coffee in the lobby and approach the machine at the same time as Lester, who tells me he’s from Hopi land. He’s here for a job interview, he says, gesturing to his neatly pressed khakis and plaid button-down, but has to taste the coffee first.

He has a twinkle in his eye. Lester’s a fun guy, I can tell. He asks where I’m from, and I tell him I’m Indian. He’s tickled by this.

Next up is Holbrook to take an important photograph for my kids: The Wigwam Motel, with its signature tipi-shaped rooms, was the inspiration for the Cozy Cone Motel in Cars. And indeed the grounds are littered with junked classics from the 1950s and ’60s.

Papier-mâché dinosaurs loom over the town near the intersection of Navajo Boulevard and the ominously named Bucket of Blood Street, but eye-catching signage lures me into Mr. Maestas, a Mexican joint.

The scrambled eggs and ham are secondary to a garlicky house salsa I’d like to take home.

A Grand Experience

The Petrified Forest National Park, home of the Painted Desert, is 20 minutes to the northeast. There is a long, slow line of cars when I arrive. I see why when I get to the entrance and fall into an extended conversation with Mary, a ranger who charms me into buying an annual park pass ($80).

Noncitizens now have to pay $250, she says conspiratorially. At the first curve of the park’s winding road, I gasp. Below me lie a sprawl of rust and ochre hillocks, undulating all the way to the horizon.

I foolishly try to photograph them before realizing that, much like the Grand Canyon, capturing this kind of beauty in a static image is impossible.

It reminds me of how we all try to pin the moon to Instagram and she never submits.

Later I detour from 66 toward Window Rock, and the capital of Navajo Nation reveals itself to be one of the most spectacular drives I’ve experienced, bountiful with sedimentary miracles like the namesake formation: a 200-foot-tall sandstone cliff with an almost perfect circle carved into it.

The area is peaceful, silent but for the wind. The ceremonial name for the site was originally Ni’ Ałníi’gi, Diné for Center of the World.