Sunset Limited, Entering The 1950's

A Weekend Visit To The Grand Canyon And Sedona

Page Three: On Our Way To Williams

Los Alamitos to Williams by Maquest
Estimated Time: 6 hours 27 minutes Estimated Distance: 438.29 miles

Route 66

Highway 66 signage
The Mother Road

U.S. Route 66 (also known as the Will Rogers Highway after the humorist, and colloquially known as the "Main Street of America" or the "Mother Road") was a highway in the U.S. Highway System. One of the original U.S. highways, Route 66, US Highway 66, was established on November 11, 1926. However, road signs did not go up until the following year.

The famous highway originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, before ending at Los Angeles, encompassing a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km). It was recognized in popular culture by both a hit song and a television show in the 50s and 60s. It also inspired many characters and places in 2006 Disney/Pixar animated feature film, Cars.

Route 66 underwent many improvements and realignments over its lifetime, changing its path and overall length. Many of the realignments gave travelers faster or safer routes, or detoured around city congestion. One realignment moved the western endpoint further west from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.

Route 66 was a major path of the migrants who went west, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and supported the economies of the communities through which the road passed. People doing business along the route became prosperous due to the growing popularity of the highway, and those same people later fought to keep the highway alive even with the growing threat of being bypassed by the new Interstate Highway System.

US 66 was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 27, 1985 after it was decided the route was no longer relevant and had been replaced by the Interstate Highway System.

Our Pictures

To Williams Arizona
Turn on GPS and the rest is easy!

To Williams Arizona
Quigley's is our favorite in-route place to eat!

To Williams Arizona
Rest stops are super for stretching our legs

To Williams Arizona
The "Silver Bullet" is ready to go

To Williams Arizona
I-40 parallels the train tracks and we saw about 50 long freight trains

To Williams Arizona
Leaving California

To Williams Arizona
I-49 is easy to drive; not much traffic and wide road

Arizona Rest Stop

To Williams Arizona
Afternoon thunder clouds are brewing ahead of us

To Williams Arizona
Our destination

To Williams Arizona
Nowhere Arizona!

To Williams Arizona
The flag was beautiful against the blue sky!

To Williams Arizona
Amazingly clear skies for an hour and then.....

Dust Devils And A Cloudburst!

Dust devils form when hot air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler low pressure air above it. If conditions are just right, the air may begin to rotate. As the air rises suddenly, the column of hot air is stretched vertically causing intensification of the spinning effect by the scientific principle conservation of angular momentum. The secondary flow in the dust devil causes other hot air to speed horizontally inward to the bottom of the newly-forming vortex. As more hot air rushes in toward the developing vortex to replace the air that is rising, the spinning effect becomes further intensified and self-sustaining. A dust devil, fully formed, is a funnel-like chimney through which hot air moves, both upwards and in a circle. As the hot air rises it cools, loses its buoyancy and eventually ceases to rise. As it rises it displaces air which descends outside the core of the vortex. This cool air returning acts as a balance against the spinning hot air outer wall and keeps the system stable.

The spinning effect, along with surface friction, usually will produce a forward momentum. The dust devil is able to sustain itself longer by moving over nearby sources of hot surface air.

To Williams Arizona
Look at the center and see the "dust devil"

To Williams Arizona
It began as a few drops and then...

A cloudburst is an extreme form of rainfall, sometimes mixed with hail and thunder, which normally lasts no longer than a few minutes but is capable of creating minor flood conditions. They are called 'bursts' probably because it was believed earlier that clouds were solid masses full of water. These violent storms were attributed to their bursting.

To Williams Arizona
It rained so hard we had to pull over and wait as the
visibility was zero... About 90 seconds!


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