The boarded-up stucco trading post on the north side of Route 66 is the only reason most travellers slow down at Budville. Bud Rice opened it in 1928 as a gas station, garage and store for travellers on the new transcontinental highway; for forty years it was the centre of life for a few hundred ranchers and Acoma residents who lived along this stretch of the road.
It has been closed for decades. The building is intact — the pumps gone but the painted signs faded onto the stucco, the windows shuttered, weeds growing through the concrete forecourt. It is private property and you cannot go inside, but the exterior is a photograph worth pulling over for: one of the most evocative of the surviving Route 66 ruins in New Mexico.