Our Trip – Day Two

I’m on-the-road with my family, driving from L.A. to Santa Fe. Tonight, I’m writing to you from the lobby of Hampton Inn in Flagstaff, AZ.  Yesterday, we drove along a narrow, twisting, forgotten stretch of Route 66 through Oatman, an old mining town, where wild burros roam freely down the dusty main drag.  Here’s the weird thing:  a good chunk of the DIAGNOSIS MURDER novel I turned in last month takes place in Oatman and on that stretch of Route 66…which I described without ever having been there.  It turns out that what I "imagined" was pretty close to the reality. Who says you can’t just make things up? On the way out of Oatman, we visited a gold mine (my daughter loved it) and spent the evening in snowy Williams. This morning, we headed out to the Grand Canyon under cloudless, bright blue skies….then drove into Flagstaff on Hwy 189 through snow-covered woods. We had the road almost to ourselves and stopped along the way for a snowball fight.  Tomorrow, we set out for  Gallup,  NM with stops at the Petrified Forest and  the Meteor Crater. (Click on the photo for a larger image)