First Friday and Last Saturday

We met some more of Katie's family for lunch and afterwards began to explore the city. We really didn't know much of what to do in the downtown area. When we questioned most people about what to do in the city they recommended places hours away like Sedona or Jerome, which didn't really help us out much at the time. We were meeting my friend from high school, Brad, for dinner that night and had the whole day open. He lives in the city and we figured, Phoenix being the bustling metropolis that it is, we could find something to busy ourselves with until the evening. Katie, who has been obsessed with visiting various farmers markets during our whole trip, found out that there are several located in Phoenix. The first one we visited was called the Phoenix Public Market. Here they have an open air market twice a week but unfortunately we missed it by one day. Still we spent about a half hour in the store, browsing the eclectic food and beer selections they offered. While checking out, our cashier took it upon himself to tell us all about Phoenix and what there is to do and explore while in town. We took a couple of his recommendations to heart. The first was to visit this a nearby hotel called the Claredon Hotel. He told us that it was one of the only places in Phoenix where you could sit on a rooftop and see the city. More interestingly he told us of a car bombing that happened there back in the late 60's. It was a fascinating story involving mob connections, corrupt reports, and a bloody death in the hotels parking lot. The story, he said, was detailed on the walls of the hotel along the hallway to the bathroom. His other suggestion which we decided to act upon was to stay another night and visit the First Friday festival. This is a giant street fair that occurs each first friday of a new month where local artists try to sell their art to the community. After visiting the Claredon, watching the sunset on the rooftop, then readying the lengthy store about the mob hit, we headed over to Brads. During our dinner we discussed First Friday's with him and his girlfriend, ultimately convincing them to join us the following evening. That night we made a stop by the area in which is is held and went to a bar there that was formally a house. Like all the houses on this street, it was more than it seemed. After looking closely down the block, you could see signs in various windows or boards in the lawn advertising the business inside. The bars name was the Lost Leaf and inside it was noticeable that it was once a house. It looked as though all the furniture had been sold on the lawn, the walls painted in solid, dark colors, and a bar put up in the corner near the kitchen. They had a band set up in what should have been the back bedroom and tables filling the rest of the floor. We stayed here the rest of the night and planned to come back the following day as our cashier friend had recommended this bar as a great place to go. When Friday dawned, we again enjoyed our patented lazy morning at Uncle Ted and Aunt Bernie's, complete with hot tub time and an excellent breakfast. Much like the day before, we weren't quite sure how to spend our day in Phoenix while waiting for the night. We thought to ourselves, what hadn't we explored around the Phoenix area, and the answer came to us... breweries! We left the house about noon and headed southeast of the city to Chandler. During our quick research of the area we had found that there was a brewery here located steps away from Arizona's first winery. Given our newly discovered love of wine tasting, we decided this was a perfect way to spend our afternoon. We

chose to visit the Kokopelli Winery first so that our palates would be unobstructed by the hops and malts of the beer. We got a seat right up at the bar, ordered a couple of tastings and a little snack to go along with it. In true snobbish fashion we ordered a cheese platter to go along with our wine and within minutes we had one of the largest spreads of cheese intended for 2 people that I have ever seen. I'm sure it's not surprising to learn that we ate the entire platter and that our bowels punished us for the next 48 hours because of it. Next we walked over to SanTan Brewing Company where we enjoyed a beer and some pizza in order to "fill in the corners" so to speak. We enjoyed both of these places very much and regret that we didn't get an earlier start on the day so that we could have spent more time there. As it was however, we had to get going. We were meeting Gabe and Heather again for dinner before heading over to First Friday and thus made our way over to Scottsdale once more. For dinner we went to another brewery, Four Peaks, which was right down the block from where Gabe and Heather live. Katie and I didn't eat this time, being stuffed from our earlier gorging, but again it was nice to hang out with old friends. We made our way to Brad's house around 8:30 p.m. and hit the streets about 9 p.m. Brad lives right next to neighborhood where First Friday's takes place and after a 5 minute walk we were there. Since none of us had been there before we were in no way prepared for what greeted us as we turned the corner. The streets were literally flooded with people and it seemed no one there was above the age of 17 aside from the cops on every corner. The art was housed inside actual houses which have been transformed into makeshift galleries for the day. Some lawns had DJ's out front and others had parties going on in the back. It was crazy. We made our way through the throngs of people and explored a few houses and the art they held. We weren't serious about buying and it felt like virtually no one was. We walked by the bar we had visited the previous night and found out where all the 21+ crowd was hanging out. The line was all the way to the curb and none of us felt like spending an hour waiting to be crammed shoulder to shoulder. We decided to leave this area and head for the downtown area which also celebrates First Friday in their own way. They close off a few city blocks and hold a large concert in the middle of the street; free admission and cheap beer! We stayed there the rest of the night until the music stopped, the beer ran out, and fights began to break out in front of us between the locals. This officially ended our week long stay in the Phoenix area. We both felt like we spent our time here perfectly. We saw all of our relatives that lived in the area and got to hang out with each of our friends on two separate occasions; visited both National Parks and even visited a winery and a couple breweries. You couldn't ask for much more on our week long stay.

The next day, Saturday, we headed north to visit the cities of

Jerome and Sedona. Without exception, every person that we visited while in Phoenix told us to visit these 2 cities. Naturally, one of the first questions Katie and I ask people while traveling is what there is to do in their cities. Usually people rattle off restaurants or well known tourist attractions but in the Phoenix area, it was Sedona. And for those of you who don't know, its not like Sedona is a suburb or something. Its a good 3 hour drive north of the Phoenix area up in the mountains. Sedona is known for its fiery red rocks and beautiful mountain scenery. Jerome, the other town we were told to visit, is known

for being an old mining town. Its city streets are much the same as they were in the old days and many of the shops feature the towns history and the part they had to play in it. We ended up getting on the road a little later than we had intended, around 11 a.m. which gave us less daylight than we would have liked to visit these two towns. Our first stop was Jerome. We had already driven through this town once before on our way to Phoenix after visiting the nearby Tuzigoot National Monument. Now it was time for us to explore the city. We parked CJ in what we hoped was a free parking lot and began to walk around. Being a hillside town, the

view from the city streets was beautiful, but we only briefly got to relish it spending most of our time here doing Katie's favorite activity, shopping. We walked up and down the streets stopping at almost every store to shop. There were about 3 wineries in the town, one reportedly owned by Maynard Keenan, lead singer of Tool, but because of our late start we had no time to stop and enjoy them. We stayed in the town for a couple hours before deciding to move on to Sedona. Because of its reputation of beautiful red rocks we did not care to visit this town after nightfall when we wouldn't be able to enjoy the scenery. We headed down the mountain and

over to Sedona where we were blessed with a few hours of daylight to enjoy our surroundings. We drove all around the city just soaking up the magnificent views. Before the sun had set, we made our way to the Oak Creek Brewing Company, snagged one of the best seats in the house, and relaxed watching the setting sun reflect off the red rock while we enjoyed dinner. That night, instead of driving for a while up to Flagstaff and enduring the cold, we made it an early night and stayed at the same rest stop we had on our way south, enjoying the pseudo warmth compared to frigid Flagstaff.