My trip to Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding cities and suburbs has come to an end. I already published a bunch of blog posts over the past couple weeks showing some of the tourist activities I’ve done; here is an index, in case you missed them:
Like usual, I have some miscellaneous photos from my travels for which it wouldn’t make sense to have individual dedicated blog posts, so as a wrap-up to my time in Phoenix, here is a dump of my remaining pictures.
When I arrived in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, I saw on Google Maps that there was a museum inside the airport. On my way out of the terminal and while walking towards the PHX Sky Train, I made a quick stop at the Phoenix Airport Museum.
One of my favorite things about Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is the fact that there is a free transit system that moves you off of the main airport terminal area. I appreciate airports that do this because it reduces landside congestion a substantial amount—it lets people choose whether to get curbside pickup or spend a few extra minutes getting off-property to save a higher ratio of time with ground transportation.
When I first started traveling a lot, I was intrigued trying out different hotel brands under the Marriott family and taking pictures of different rooms. However, after having lived full-time out of hotel rooms during my multi-year road trip, they got less interesting to me.
A long time ago, I used to post photos of my hotel rooms, but since then, I’ve stopped; a few people have asked me to resume, so here is the room I stayed in at the AC Hotel by Marriott Phoenix Downtown.
On the night of my arrival, I had dinner at the Moira Sushi Bar & Kitchen on East McKinley Street.
I ordered a chirashi bowl, my go-to sushi dish when I go to a new restaurant because of how uniquely different it can be across different restaurants and how well it captures the style of each individual chef.
Having stayed in downtown, a lot of things were in walking distance for me, so I did a lot of walking during my trip. There are some interesting buildings and structures in Phoenix; here are a few that I thought were nice or interesting enough to photograph.
For one of my dinners, I met up with some friends and went to Guiseppe’s on 28th (which, funny enough, technically isn’t on 28th, but on East Indian School Road due to the direction its front door faces).
As our appetizer, we got a medley of four variants of their bruschetta: fresh tomato and basil, creamy gorgonzola cheese and honey, brie with Tuscan salami vino cotto, and house-made pesto and fresh tomato.
My friends got gnocchi and butternut squash ravioli as their main entrées. The gnocchi was mixed in with a cream and tomato cardinale sauce, and the ravioli was tossed in sage brown butter.
I decided to order a signature dish and got spaghetti neri—house-made squid ink pasta with shrimp, calamari, and clams in tomato broth.
For dessert, we shared a tiramisu with cocoa, espresso, and mascarpone cheese.
During one of my late afternoons and evenings, I went for a walk at Papago Park. I hiked up to the Hole-in-the-Rock and was able to enjoy some nice, panoramic views of the surrounding area.
And with that trip complete and a new city achieved, I updated my travel map.
I started this travel map several years ago when I first started traveling for esports events with Tempo Storm, and I didn’t really expect it to get this dense, so I didn’t exactly build it in a particularly scalable way (even the resolution is so low that I have to use Photoshop’s resizing algorithm to generate a higher-resolution version to render on 4K monitors).
I may make a new, more robust and expandable travel map in the future, but until then, here is where I’ve been in the United States so far.
