With our hike out of the Grand Canyon behind us, we were feeling utterly exhausted and only desired a decent meal. We wanted to drive down the Historic Route 66, which was in the direction we were going anyway so off of a recommendation, we decided to stop in a little RT. 66 town called Seligman. Seligman, AZ has a storied history as the town where 66 actually began. It was also the town from which Pixar creators based their hit animated children’s movie, Cars.

We made our stand at a great little roadside burger joint called Delgadillo’s Snow Cap. Snow Cap is one of those fun and janky little places where everything is a prank, a joke, or they make fun of you. Even the doors of the restaurant had two door knobs with a false knob and a pull sign. Let’s just point out that Frank fell for this trick not once, not twice, but three times. Aside from the food, one of the greatest things about Snow Cap was all the awesome “Americana” memorabilia that littered the property – old cars, road signs, gas pumps, stickers, etc were scattered everywhere.

With a satisfying meal behind us and without having taken a shower or done laundry in nearly 5 days, we made one of the hardest decisions of our trip…we paid for a motel. The motel we chose looked exactly how you would imagine a 65 year old, roadside, desert motel. Virtually nothing cosmetic had changed or been updated since it was built. Had we known our abode offered theme rooms, we probably would have paid the extra $10 for the John Wayne Room.

Following our hot showers, clean laundry, and a decent nights sleep we figured we were still close to the Grand Canyon and it might be nice to see it from a different perspective. We had seen the inside of the Canyon at Havasu, now we wanted see it from above at the South Rim. We arrived just before sunset for some spectacular panoramic views of the South Rim at a lookout called Yavapai Point. Yavapai is a great lookout because it’s not well known to the public as a viewing point. In addition, it has a smaller parking lot so it’s typically not overcrowded and offers numerous places to observe in somewhat peace and quiet.

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That night we stopped at the one and only Yippee-Ei-O! Steakhouse right outside of the Grand Canyon. With a table next to the fireplace, we shared a candle lit dinner with an appetizer of what we were told was authentic rattlesnake. We found a hotel parking lot nearby where we spent another cold night in the van. We woke up around 5:30am so we could drive back to Yavapai Point and watch the sunrise.

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Later in the morning we started our drive to Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah boarders of the Navajo Indian Reservation. Monument Valley offers the iconic backdrop of the American West that many of us recognize from Hollywood films. After a drive through the valley, it took another hour of searching to find the location of a scene from one of our favorite movies. We were searching for the place that Forrest Gump ended his run after 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours. Marked by only a wooden sign, if you don’t know where to look, it would be nearly impossible to locate. We conducted yet another photo shoot with hundreds of photos at this beautiful location.

Realizing we were only a 1.5 hour drive to the Four Corners Monument, we wanted to check out the only place in the U.S. that you can be in four places at once. When we arrived at the front gate, to our surprise (and to the surprise of many other tourists), the park was already closed for the evening. Driving an hour and a half in the wrong direction for no reason was a bit disheartening but we made the best of it by continuing the drive for another hour to the town of Cortez, Colorado. Cortez is only a few minutes away from Mesa Verde National park. We grabbed dinner at a local brewery where we did not get a warm welcome from off duty local law enforcement sitting a nearby table.  I guess our kind (van people) were not welcome in those parts.  After a decent meal and a plethora of dirty stares, we parked our little girl amongst another RV community of the local Wal-Mart parking lot.