Phoenix - sort of

We visited my brother Jerry in Buckeye Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) for a few days. We hadn’t seen them in well over a year, so it was really nice to spend some time with him and Brenda, and get a chance to see their spanking new house. We didn’t do much, other than morning walks around the neighborhood. We did manage to get out in his new golf cart, complete with stereo speakers, and we managed to find a couple of geocaches in his neighborhood.

We carved out a morning and headed to the Museum of Musical Instruments in nearby Gilbert – still almost an hour away. It had musical instruments and displays from all over the world, and was really quite impressive. The oldest thing we saw there, at least that could be authenticated, was a harpsicord made in Italy in 1639. The museum was huge, and even with a whole day, you could only really get a quick glimpse of all it had to offer.

Jerry and Brenda had to take us to all their normal haunts to show us off to their friends – the regulars. It was really strange to go to bars where nobody, not even the servers were wearing masks, but I guess we have to rely on the vaccines at some point. We managed to hit Oreganos (beers and dinner) as well as the Irish Wolf Hound (just beers, but I got a nice black and tan specialty of the owner and the women had some shepherd’s pie). At Brookside it was just beers, but we did manage to get in some darts.

Where Jerry and Brenda live, there is a gas station – that’s it. There is no grocery store, no restaurants and no bars – nothing! To get to any retail businesses, you have to drive east 20 minutes – pretty much always driving through the city of Surprise where they used to live. The good news is that on the drive to the bar each day, we got to pass by Surprise’s favorite local landmark – the infamous hugging Saguaro cactuses.

It wasn’t just bars and food. We did head over to the community center and look around. At one of the community centers Jerry asked me to teach him the rules for Pickleball. We had a great time! Although we only played one game (after which we were done in), it took us as long as the locals take for 3 games.

We actually just missed Jerry’s birthday by a couple of weeks. We managed to score him a beer mug made out of an Arizona Diamondback’s bat. It was pretty awesome. But not nearly as awesome as this new hat we got him.

Talk to you soon.