Show Low to Cortez to Durango

We got together with friends Lila and Stephen Dudley at the Elks Lodge where we parked the motorhome in Show Low. It was Friday night fish fry, which was pretty good. Then they invited us to see their cabin in the woods and have dessert at their place. So we followed them over and got a tour of the neighborhood. What a nice place to escape the heat in lower elevations of Arizona in the summer!

Thanks for the special tour and delicious key lime pie, Steve & Lila. We’ll visit you again next time we’re in that neck of the woods!

One day we drove to nearby Snowflake to view some of the pioneer homes. It was the day of the historical society’s big rummage sale, so there was nobody to lead tours through the homes except for a reluctant young woman in the museum, and she would have had to close up the museum to give us a tour. We opted to just do a driving tour around town.

As we learned in the Show Low museum, Snowflake was named after Erastus Snow and William Flake, Mormon pioneers, who founded it in 1878. Below is the Flake home.

This monument honors the pioneers.

Leaving Show Low, we drove to Cortez, Colorado. The trip was a little over 300 miles, farther than we like to drive in a day, but we weren’t drawn to stay anywhere else along the way. We did make a slight detour (on very bad, narrow, worn-out roads) to visit the famed Four Corners. The monument was established by native Americans and we were charged $5 per person for the privilege of parking in a rough dirt lot (that took a lot of planning to avoid having to un-hitch the towed) and go stand in line to get our picture taken. We started a conversation with a nice family from Munich, Germany, on a tour of the American west. So we swapped cameras and took pictures of each other.

Now we can say, “been there, done that.”

We loved our brief stay in Cortez, did a little shopping, found a wonderful Italian restaurant, and just kicked back. One of the trading posts had lots of beautiful native American items for sale with beautiful price tags ($$$$$!) plus a free museum on the lower level.

One day we visited the Anasazi Heritage Center, and since it’s a Federal institution we got free admission with our “geezer card.” It was very interesting and we recommend it to anyone traveling through the area.

I really enjoyed seeing the beautiful hand-crafted items from so long ago.

Also, the artifacts unearthed by archaeologists were fascinating.

Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that our friends Wendy and Mike Lawrence were in Cortez, so we missed a chance to get together with them.

We’re now in Durango, where we celebrated our 9th anniversary yesterday with a wonderful dinner at Ken & Sue’s Restaurant in the historical downtown. I posted the picture below on Facebook and couldn’t believe all the well-wishes we received from friends and family! Thank you all, we really loved hearing from you.

In closing, many of you know that Kay Peterson, co-founder of the Escapees RV Club with her late husband Joe Peterson, passed away after a brief illness at the age of 90. We were so privileged to know her and Joe personally, and she will be missed by many. Our friend Nick Russell wrote a wonderful eulogy in his blog post Goodbye Miss Kay, and I encourage all RVers to read it. What a marvelous woman!