Day trip to Wickenburg and Jerome

Just before leaving the Phoenix area, we took a day trip to the towns of Wickenburg and Jerome, Arizona.  Our first destination, Wickenburg, lies 75 miles NW of Scottsdale and you can get there by a couple of different routes.  We went through Surprise and Sun City on US-60 W. If you read my earlier “birds and the bees” post,…

Final Thoughts on our time in Phoenix

I’ve written a number of posts about our three weeks in the Phoenix area (and our home base of Scottsdale), and there a number of “one-offs” that I wanted to share with you.  These are attractions and sites that we visited that didn’t quite deserve a post on their own, but nevertheless warranted some mention.  So…

Mary gets in trouble in Phoenix

First it was paper napkins and plastic cutlery.  Next it was small packages of honey, and miniature bottles of jam and marmalade. From there it grew into the odd piece of fruit or cookie.  I watched in growing horror as right before my eyes, Mary was turning into a Kleptomaniac.  I did everything I could to…

Me, Marilyn and the Phoenix Art Museum

I was 7 when Marilyn Monroe died in August of 1962.  I actually remember hearing about it on the radio as my mom and dad were having breakfast and I was getting ready to go to school.  I don’t remember my reaction, or my parents’, I just remember the event.  For the next 10 years or so, any thoughts…

Musical Instrument Museum – Scottsdale

  When we were in Phoenix/Scottsdale at the beginning of March for the Canucks road trip, the concierge at the JW Marriot Desert Resort suggested we go and visit the Musical Instrument Museum.  He didn’t tell us much about it, and to be honest, it hadn’t really shown up in any of our pre-trip research. …

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West

While neither Mary nor I are students of architecture per se, we are both interested and fascinated by it, and in particular the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.  Among his most famous designs are Falling Water, near Pittsburgh, completed in 1935, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, completed shortly after Wright’s death at the age of 91, in…

Desert Botanical Gardens and Chihuly in the Park

When first researching “things to do” in Phoenix, one of the attractions that kept coming up on every website I visited was the Desert Botanical Gardens.   I have to confess that I am not a huge fan of wandering around flower gardens, but everything I read about it indicated it was a worthwhile place to visit.  Making…

Ancestral Ruins of Arizona

Before setting out on this 2014 road trip, I looked out my well-travelled copy of “Passport To Your National Parks”, a book I have carried with me on several trips to the United States dating back to 2003.  It contains commemorative date stamps of visits we’ve made to places like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty,…

Ziegler Fiesta Bowl Museum

With the exception of 4 days when we flew to Tampa to see some Blue Jays Spring Training games, we made Scottsdale our home base from March 15th to April 5th.  While I will probably write at least one blog post to give you our overall impressions of the area, (given it was our first…

Flagstaff and Sedona

We left our house in Langley on Saturday March 8th, and after a week on the road, and nearly 2500 kms of driving, we were finally on the “home stretch” as far as getting to our condo in Scottsdale was concerned.  We had planned to get up early on Saturday morning (March 15th), spending some time in…

The Grand Canyon – Wow!

This 2014 “Make it up as we go” adventure originally started out (for the most part) as a three week trip to the Phoenix area to see some spring training baseball games, and a few local sites and attractions.  We were simply going to rent a condo and fly down, renting a car once we got there. One night as…

Let me tell you bout the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees…….

So as most of our friends and business associates know, we love to walk, and we especially enjoy bird-watching.  If you want the background story, visit our corporate website http://www.dsamedia.ca and in the “about” section, you’ll find a piece called “Why Birds?  With all of our travels over the past 30 years, Mary has now seen…