Standin' on a corner...

My parents live about 80 miles from Winslow, AZ of "Take it Easy" fame, and Gina and I agreed we couldn't possibly be so close and not go stand on the infamous corner. So off we went in my mom's Honda - not a flat-bed Ford, but it is red! - to see the tiny town The Eagles' first single put on the map of pop-culture tourist must-sees. (We actually went on Saturday, and I meant to post this a few days ago, but put it off in favor of spending a little more time with my parents and Gina during my last days of vacation.)

My maturity must be increasing, because rather than tearing off down the highway as soon as my parents' house was out of sight, I started down the road with the odometer indicating a fairly sane speed. Although part of that might have been because I'm terrified of the sheriffs and highway patrols who regularly lurk around turns near my parents' town and hand out speeding tickets at an alarming rate. Because of them, I regularly refuse to go more than five miles over the speed limit in town and on roads I don't know, but no one else seems to share my caution (which may explain the highway patrol's zest for writing tickets), so even at 60mph instead of the posted 55, I had cranky tailgaters five feet behind me for the first third of our mini-road trip, which was on a winding two-lane highway with no passing lanes. Not that such a minor detail stopped them from passing me whenever there was enough of a straightaway to see that they had at least five seconds to get around me before potentially being creamed by oncoming traffic.

We made it to Winslow in about an hour and a half, and after driving around for approximately ninety seconds, found the fabled corner, pictured at left. It's part of what is now Standin' On The Corner Park, and the mural on the building behind the statue of one of the Eagles depicts the song. The girl (my lord!) in the flat-bed Ford is "reflected" in one of the mural's storefront windows, and the couple in one of the upstairs windows is presumably Glenn Frey, who was the song's lead vocalist, with one of the "four [women] who wanna own me." If you look closely, there's even a bald eagle in the mural. Which actually fits fairly well, since some do live in the area (the birds, not the band).

After taking at least a dozen more pictures than such a small geographic area warrants (among them the one below, where we tried - and failed - to get both the statue and ourselves in a photo I took with one hand due to a lack of anyone else around to ask to take it for us), Gina and I crossed the street in search of souvenirs - I already had a t-shirt from my parents' visit to Winslow, so I contented myself with a coffee mug. We ate lunch a little further down the block at Bojo's Grill & Sports Club, wandered around for another twenty minutes in search of something interesting and, finding only the train station and the reconstructed LaPosada Hotel, decided to head back, but not before making one more quick stop by the corner to take pictures of the essential piece of Eagles lore we'd somehow left out of the first photo session.

The red flat-bed Ford pickup parked on permanent display next to the corner may have been what bumped the Mini-Road Trip-O-Meter from fun and goofy to truly exciting (although still slightly goofy). The whole trip made our day, but I think we giggled more about the Ford than anything else, for whatever reason. All-in-all, the drive was well worth it, and I'll be telling anyone who knows the song about my few moments "standin' on the corner in Winslow, Arizona" for at least the next few weeks!