Desert Trip – Day 1

Today I’m continuing to share about our Desert trip…

The next day (Monday) even though it felt like we went to bed at 2 or 3 am because we went from central time to pacific time, we got up at a decent hour. We wanted to start exploring before it got really hot.

We had breakfast at the hotel and ventured over to South Mountain Park. We saw this interesting place on the way and stopped, because we were obsessed with cacti! Rob grabbed this cute selfie of us at Scorpion Gulch.

We had wanted to explore Mormon Trail. However, we got over there and the parking lot was full. We decided it was really getting toasty so hiking was probably not the best idea at this point.

We ended up deciding to drive towards Tempe.

1st quick stop: Tempe Diablo stadium where the Angels’s play for Spring Training. We were taking note of all the Spring Training venues as we plan to come back a couple times to catch games at all the Arizona Spring Training stadiums.

Then, we made our way over to the campus of Arizona State University, which is a really cool campus. Clean and modern.

We ended up parking near the Tempe downtown and found Mr. Mesquite Taqueria where we stopped for a couple tacos for a snack.

City hall is in this super cool building like an upside down pyramid.

After exploring the cute little Tempe down area more, we wanted to find the Arizona State baseball stadium.

From there we went to Hole in the Rock

You park on the front side of the rock. If you walk around the rock to the backside, that is where you will find the trail to walk up. Short trail. You go through the hole and can sit and check out the views.

We drove by Scottsdale Stadium where the Giants play and through Old Town Scottsdale and made our way to a place for lunch called Diego Pops. Rob had this recommendation from a friend. Super cute, trendy place. We got the Chips and corn Queso with Fresca & Salsa. I had the Pork Pineapple & Green Chili Chicken tacos (both on hard shells). Rob got the Pastor and Charred Steak.

After lunch, we walked around this cute area. We discovered the Arizona Canal, with lots of beautiful succulunts planted along the sidewalk.

And have yall seen these self-driving cars?? Wild!

I wanted to check out the Arizona Biltmore mainly because when I was growing up my Uncle Guy got married there and he flew my Grandmother and I out there for the weekend. (See pics here.) I wanted to see what it was like now. We ended up just driving through because it was check in time and parking looked more complicated than I wanted to deal with. Beautiful place!

Here’s a similar view from my time there in 1991!

Next stop before going back to the hotel was Roosevelt Row. Artsy area with tons of cool murals and art displays.

Then, we went back to hotel for a little break. Then we walked over to Chase Field for a Diamondbacks Baseball game. We always like to get to a new stadium early, so we can check out the area, walk the entire stadium, and Rob finds where to get his MLB passport book stamped.

We saw these Churro Dogs and had fully intended to go back to get one. However, we were sitting on the upper level and very few of the food vendors were open on that level. This meant we’d have to go all they way back down and back up again, so we never did. Looked so good and so sugary.

When we were walking to the stadium we saw the stadium roof was opened and I was initially so mad, because I just did not want to be hot. However, it ended up really cooling off and felt really nice. Here you see the open the side panels which allowed for a breeze.

We both got the Copper Steak Sandwich. Pretty yummy!

Here’s Rob’s stamps in his MLB passbook.

Diamondbacks beat the Padres. Weird game though. Rows and rows of empty seats. Not a lot of production when it came to the game atmosphere. Sad really.

Then we walked back to our hotel and off to bed for another big day tomorrow!