Retrologist's Roadside Pick: The Apple Dumplin, a dusty relic along an old spur of Route 66
Retrologist's Roadside Pick: The Apple Dumplin, a dusty relic along an old spur of Route 66
The abandoned cowboy-themed restaurant made for a colorful stop on the way to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
It's been more than 10 years since my pals and I traveled Route 66 from Prairie to Pacific, and one of our favorite stops was the remnants of the old Apple Dumplin Restaurant in Chambers, Arizona.
When I noticed that today was National Apple Dumpling Day, I figured the time had come to publish these photos.
By June 2013, when we visited, the restaurant was closed and for sale, though it had been open as recently as 2010, according to scraps of information I could find online.
In its day, the Apple Dumplin was a Western-themed restaurant packed with curios in the dining room and comfort food on the plates, the staff gussied up in cowboy attire.
The relics of the restaurant were intriguing, from the giant frying pans attached to the fence posts to folk-arty depictions of Apple Dumplin, a bespectacled donkey chewing on an apple.
The whole place conjured up memories of the silly 1975 Disney movie "The Apple Dumpling Gang."
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