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.

There’s more to the Phoenix Metropolitan Area than just Phoenix. While here, I’ve been spending time in some neighboring cities too—I already explored Old Town Scottsdale, and earlier today, I adventured around Tempe and the Arizona State University campus.

I started on the northern side of the Salt River near the Tempe Town Lake marina and walked west on the Tempe Town Lake North Bank Path until I reached the Tempe Town Lake Pedestrian Bridge. From there, I was able to get some nice views of downtown Tempe.

This is also close to the Tempe Town Lake Dam.

I arrived on the southern side of Tempe Town Lake right by the Tempe Center for the Arts. Unfortunately, the park directly to the east of this performing arts theater was closed for construction, so I had to go around on Rio Salado Parkway instead of walking on the beach.

After continuing a bit on Rio Salado Parkway and passing its intersections with Ash Avenue and Mill Avenue, I started climbing up the Hayden Butte, often called “A” Mountain due to the large letter “A” on the southern face of the incline.

Once I reached the summit, I got nice sweeping views of Tempe with a little bit of Scottsdale to the north, Mesa to the east, and the downtown Phoenix skyline to the west.

I descended the mountain on the opposite side and ended up at the Tempe Transportation Center on Veterans Way and College Avenue.

From there, I walked a bit south and then west, passing the interestingly-shaped Tempe Municipal Building on the way to Mill Avenue.

After taking a look at some of the shops on Mill Avenue, I walked eastbound on University Drive until reaching the Arizona State University Bridge leading into the Palm Walk.

From there, I went deeper into the Arizona State University campus, looking at the different architecture of the buildings until sunset.

For dinner, I returned to Mill Avenue and went to Matsuri Izakaya. The atmosphere of the restaurant was colorful and interesting.

Unfortunately, the food quality was pretty mediocre. I ordered a salmon bowl; the portion size of the salmon relative to the rice was a bit disappointing, the salmon didn’t really have that strong of a salmon flavor, and the texture made it seem like the fish wasn’t as fresh as it could have been.

After dinner, I walked back to the Tempe Transportation Center, purchased a US$2.00 single-ride ticket for the light rail, and rode my way back to my hotel in downtown Phoenix.

I had a satisfying time in Tempe. The environment of the university campus was both nostalgic and inspiring, and I felt a level of motivation and energy in Tempe that I don’t always sense in non-college cities. Everything was decently clean, and although I didn’t have any direct interactions with strangers, most of them seemed like they were going about life with a positive attitude.

If I ever return to the Phoenix Metropolitan Area after this trip, I will most likely stay in Tempe. There was an unusually high number of hotels under the Marriott brand in Tempe, and even though it doesn’t seem to have too many dedicated attractions within the downtown and campus area, it seemed like a very nice and safe place to just go for a walk and get some fresh air during my free time.

For my next adventure, I made my way over to Arizona. I’ve been to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon before, but I went straight northwest afterwards and didn’t get a chance to visit the southern cities, so I decided to take another trip to Arizona to explore the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.

Today’s adventure was in Scottsdale. I had a bit of a late start to my day, so in the very late afternoon, I hopped in a Waymo self-driving, autonomous vehicle and took a ride to Old Town.

Unfortunately, right as I arrived, it started raining. I considered taking shelter for a bit, but eventually decided I wouldn’t let some suboptimal weather put a stop to my tourism, so I went back out into the precipitation and walked around the Scottsdale Waterfront.

I made my way over to the Soleri Bridge and crossed over the Arizona Canal, continuing south deeper into Old Town.

I continued southbound on Drinkwater Boulevard to check out the Scottsdale Civic Center. By this point, the sun had already set and it was getting pretty dark.

After continuing west on Civic Center Park Path, I popped right out on Brown Avenue in front of Main Street. I still had a bit of time left before my dinner appointment, so I did a few loops around to explore the shops alongside Main Street, 1st Avenue, and Scottsdale Road, and Marshall Way.

When it came time for dinner, I met up with a couple friends at the Frybread Lounge on Main Street. We picked this location because this is apparently the only Native-owned restaurant in Old Town Scottsdale and I was interested in trying Indigenous cuisine.

As our appetizer, we started with their Frybread Flight, three miniature frybread with side dipping sauces of powdered sugar, honey, Ramona Farms O’odham tepary bean hummus, and Lakota wojapi berry sauce.

This was my first time ever trying frybread. When it came out and I saw it for the first time, I wondered if I would dislike it because it basically looked like regular flatbread that was deep fried (and I usually am not the biggest fan of fried foods), but it ended up being pretty good. It wasn’t excessively oily or greasy; the fried flavor was strong enough that it was distinctly different than flatbread, but not so fried that it was heavy.

For my entrée, upon recommendation by our waitress, I ordered a bison burger containing two quarter-pound bison patties topped with chipotle aioli, romaine lettuce, diced tomatoes, diced red onion, and a slice of cheddar cheese, all nestled inside frybread.

The best way for me to describe this is that it was pretty much normal burger, but inside frybread. The frybread gave it a very unique texture that added an interesting and distinct identity to the dish, and that flavor profile is something that I had not tried before. However, ultimately, it was basically just a regular bison burger with the bun swapped out for thick, fried flatbread.

For my beverage (not pictured) to go along with my burger, I ordered a cup of coffee that was roasted on the Salt River Maricopa Indian Community Nation. I’m not at all a coffee enthusiast and I don’t have a well-refined palate when it comes to identifying different kinds of coffee, so I couldn’t really tell a difference between this coffee and mass-produced American coffee, but with a little bit of half-and-half and sweetener, it made for a nice drink to accompany my meal.

And with that, that is one tourist activity down out of many more to come during my several-day stay in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.

My trip to Denver, Colorado has come to an end, and like usual, I visited a lot of museums, restaurants, and other tourist hotspots while I was there: the Denver Firefighters Museum, Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, Clyfford Still Museum, Colorado State Capitol, Forney Museum of Transportation, Denver Christkindlmarket, and Uchi Denver.

Here is a photo dump for everything else I did that didn’t make it into its own dedicated blog post.

On one of the first days I was in Denver, my friend and I went to Băo Brewhouse. The decor and ambiance was unique and interesting.

The service was extraordinarily slow, and we eventually found out that it was because they brought out all four of our dishes all at once, as opposed to serving them to us as they were ready.

This is honey Sichuan fried green beans with garlic, ginger, crispy onions, and furikake.

Our main entrée was short rib spicy noodles with lap cheong (Chinese sausage), garlic, ginger, scallion, baby bok choy, peppers, fresno chili, Thai basil, pistachio, sambal hoisin, cilantro, daikon sprouts, and miso Mongolian sauce.

My friend wanted soup dumplings, so we ordered pork xiao long bao served with a side of sweet black vinegar and chili oil.

We also got salt and pepper tiger prawns with furikake and red pepper blend seasoning, scallion, daikon sprouts, and Chinese mustard.

Later that night, we went to watch the Denver Nuggets play basketball against the San Francisco Golden State Warriors at the Ball Arena.

It was pretty cold in Denver, but not cold enough to discourage me from exploring outdoors. On one of the days, I went for a walk around the Cherry Creek State Park in Aurora and got some nice photos of the Cherry Creek Reservoir.

Historically, I never took United Airlines because of their excessive involvement in controversial matters and their seemingly lower tier of service. However, earlier this year, I had no choice but to take a United flight because I had to urgently fly same-day out-of-state, and United was the only major carrier that had available flights to that destination. I got really lucky for that flight, because I ended up on one of their newest planes, and it was the nicest domestic first class cabin I had ever seen.

Since then, I’ve been more open to flying United, and I took them to Denver because the Denver International Airport is one of United’s major hubs, so there were a lot of options and very good pricing. Unfortunately, the luxurious first class cabin from before seemed to be a rare thing, because I haven’t gotten good luck since then. United planes seem to be the most dated out of the major American carriers if you don’t roll a new plane.

On my outbound flight to Denver, I noticed that the screens were basically just regular TVs (as opposed to an actual operating-system-like app like Delta or American Airlines have). I turned my screen off, but everyone else left theirs on and on the default channel… which was literally just advertisements playing on loop. I guess that is one way for the marketing department to squeeze out some extra ad impressions.

Maybe United heard my complaints, because on the return flight, I ended up on a plane that didn’t even have screens at all. I guess if you think about it, that is technically still better than being forced to watch your neighbors’ commercials for three hours, as long as you don’t plan on using the screen anyway.

I’m already planning my next flight for my next trip, but until then, I intended on staying put, resting up, and relaxing for the holidays.