After exploring the three different buildings composing the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, I walked across the street to the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, a park dedicated to housing various monuments and memorials honoring heroes, wars, and other events of historical significance.
Here are some photographs I snapped throughout the Plaza:
For my next tourist activity in Phoenix, I visited the Arizona State Capitol in the Government Mall neighborhood west of downtown. The Capitol consists of three different buildings—the Capitol Museum (which connects to the Executive Tower), the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
I started in the central Capitol Museum and wove in and out of the many rooms containing many museum exhibits.
The center of the museum had a dome on top, from the structural supports of which there was a chandelier hanging by a long, metallic, wound rod.
After going through the first building, I went to the southern building, home of the Senate.
As you’d expect, my third and final building tour was the northern one, home of the House of Representatives.
Security was tighter in this building for some reason, so I was escorted around by a security guard. I had a nice conversation with him; he is a fan of the Las Vegas Raiders and is looking forward to the new baseball stadium for the Athletics.
Here are some more photos of the museum exhibits taken in the central building.
This is the first Capitol I’ve seen with this large and robust of a museum on-site. I remember the Idaho State Capitol having a small set of displays on the lowest floor, but the Arizona State Capitol has a literal full-blown, multi-floor museum.
I think education should be affordable, accessible, and abundant. Although I support having a small government, I still believe government has an important place in society, and one of the roles I think it should have is to help provide opportunities to its people. Being educated is a great way to expand the scope of someone’s opportunities, so it was very nice seeing Arizona putting some of its funding towards educating the public about history and politics.
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.
One of my favorite parts of my two-year road trip across the United States and Canada a few years ago was watching snowstorms in Cottonwood Heights, Salt Lake County, Utah through floor-to-ceiling windows from the warmth of my corner hotel room. This was one of the contributing factors of why I agreed to go on a trip to Denver, Colorado with my friend—I was hoping to be able to touch some snow and enjoy the sights of a white-covered landscape.
Although there were unfortunately no snowstorms during my stay, I was still able to do some tourist activities to get me into the holiday spirit. One of those activities was attending the Denver Christkindlmarket, a holiday market produced by the Colorado Chapter of the German American Chamber of Commerce. The market is set up at Civic Center Park next to the Colorado State Capitol and hosts a bunch of different local vendors who sell food, crafts, and other holiday-themed goods.
Here are some photographs I captured during my visit:
For one of my tourist activities while in Denver, Colorado, I decided to check out the Forney Museum of Transportation in the River North Art District.
It seems like I had pretty lucky timing, because in addition to the regular vintage automobiles and locomotives that they usually have on display, they also had an exhibit of vehicles specially decorated for the holidays. On top of that, it looked like a group of people had rented out a portion of the museum for a private event, which worked out in my favor because they had a lot of holiday lights on in their area, which cast a nice sparkle on the sheen of the cars and made for a visually pleasing sight.
Here are some photographs from my visit:
