Chocolate pie & Hamlet

Harry's Roadhouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has a pretty good reputation for great desserts. However, four out of five times that I order their chocolate pie, the chocolate filling is just a small fraction of the pie. One time I put in a special order for an entire pie, waited days for it, then took it home and discovered it was 90% whipped cream topping.

OK, I'll grudgingly admit that they've probably added a week or two to my life by not giving me as much chocolate as I want, but, to paraphrase Hamlet:

How weary, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me this chocolate pie of Harry's!
Fie on't! ah, fie! Fie on thee chocolate pie,
That it should come to this!

Return to Santa Fe from Cornville

Friday, February 27. We departed Cornville and made our way back to Santa Fe. There's a Stop sign a couple of blocks from the rental house in Cornville, and another Stop sign twenty minutes away where Cornville Road joins Interstate 17 (the highway to Flagstaff). After that, there's not a Stop sign, Yield sign, or traffic light until we get .8 miles from our house (that pesky Stop sign at the dead end of St. Francis Drive).

We arrived 8 hours after leaving Cornville. However, we did stop a couple of times -- for gas, for a Route 66 dining experience, and for photos, below.

Sedona area and the Grand Canyon -- a pretty dang nice, easy trip.


The Cholla Power Plant (coal powered) between Joseph City and Holbrook, Arizona. If it weren't for the steam, there wouldn't be any scenery at all. On second thought, this area is fabulously scenic compared to driving across Texas. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.


We took the Holbrook exit, looking for a late breakfast, and found the famous Wigwam Motel, on Hopi Street.


I'm guessing it would be fun to stay here one night. Maybe "fun" is a careless choice of words. How about "interesting"? Maybe even "horrible"? Looks like some guests checked in and never checked out.


We decided to go for a real Route 66 experience and pulled the SwanMobile up to Joe & Aggies Cafe. For truckers who are lost, there's a map painted on the side of the cafe showing how to get from Chicago to Los Angeles.


Robin enters the historic Joe & Aggies Cafe.


The historic interior. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Thank goodness.


The good news is, we didn't get sick. The food was really OK. It just would have tasted better if we hadn't seen the cook enter and leave the restroom (and knowing that the restroom didn't have soap or paper towels). But hey, that's the price you sometimes pay to eat at a place with signage this cool.


Our last stop before getting home was for gas at the Route 66 Casino, about twenty miles west of Albuquerque. It's a nice place. The diner was empty, but it looked nice. The casino looks pretty cool, but we were in a hurry and didn't go in. I'd rate it as first-class if they didn't leave arrows laying all over the place.