A mile north of Budville, on the older 1937 alignment of Route 66, the Villa de Cubero trading post is the rare surviving member of the family that is still actually open for business. The store sells gasoline, snacks and a small selection of Acoma and Laguna pottery; the attached row of stucco motor-court rooms, where Hemingway is supposed to have written part of The Old Man and the Sea, has been closed for decades but still stands.
Pull in for a coffee and ask about the celebrity guests of the 1940s and 1950s. The trading post is the working bookend to Budville's abandoned one — a useful illustration of which of these tiny Route 66 stops survived and which did not.