Let it be known that this hotel is normally $400-$500 a night when it is peak season (October to May). I can tell you for a fact that August is NOT peak season in Phoenix. Since the chessplayers' rate was published online somewhere, I have no qualms about telling you that the rate we paid was $99/night with no resort fee.
Below are pictures of the bathroom.
Yes, there are glass mirrors seemingly everywhere in this bathroom.
I have a friend at CrossFit Westfield who happened to visit Phoenix a few months earlier. He gave me a specific restaurant, Los Reyes De La Torta. There is more than one, but I happened to go to the same one he went to on North 7th Street. (Scroll down on thekecmaster.yelp.com to find it.) I am not normally a fan of Mexican food, but I really did like this place. The sandwiches were enormous, & they were very presentable & definitely enjoyable to eat.
I played Ultimate Frisbee on the First Sunday (August 2) at night in Tempe with a group called DISCepticons - Phoenix Area Ultimate Frisbee Pickup. (You can look them up on facebook.) They have two games, a more serious pickup, & a more casual pickup. They wait until 7pm & play under the park lights to avoid the triple digit temperatures that one would read about in the desert. (Side note about weather: Listening to locals complain about 20% humidity was hilarious. Come east for a few days & 20% humidity suddenly isn't so bad.) Since I took an uber car trip there, I asked if anyone was heading back toward the Biltmore that could drop me off. One of the players was nice enough to do so (I feel bad, I forgot his name, so sorry I can't give credit where credit is due.). As he drove me back, we talked about red light cameras. In the middle of the discussion, he gets flashed by a red light camera! Oh boy, I hope the police decide that he was already in the intersection before it turned red, but I wouldn't put it past the camera companies to have intentionally mistimed the lights to favor the collection of money.
Monday August 3, I went on a planned one day tour with Detours Arizona to Sedona & the Grand Canyon with 6 others from Toronto, 1 from Germany, 1 from DC, & 1 from California. Our tour guide driver Jason M. was really knowledgeable about the climate, the plant life, the history, the statistics, the fun facts, & the geology covering both sites. One of the cliffs in the Grand Canyon (Visible from Lipan Point, look North from there) is the basis for all those falls with Wile E. Coyote. Cartoon history aside, it was really breathtaking to be so high up that you couldn't see people hiking or anything else below.
The second part of the trip that was really fun as the trip to Desert Botanical Garden on Saturday August 8. This place explains all the different plants of the region, how they survive different seasons, & how people in the area adapted to life in the area.
I went to Back Alley CrossFit on Thursday August 6 in the morning (7:30). The instructor seemed to be more in tune with the attendees (compared to my first road box visit at a different place on Tuesday 7:30 AM) & my warmup partner was really welcoming. This instructor gave us a lot of different tips & worked with everyone to see if they could do the hard part of the workout. The warmup exercises were different, but at least made sense & I felt ready to tackle rope climbs.
Side note: Part of the warmup was a partner row. If you both row exactly 100 meters, no pushup or situp penalty. If you end short of 100, the difference is the number of pushups & the number of situps. If you go over, the Price is Right Style Penalty is either 10 or 15 of each. (I lost the screenshot, so I forget which number)
I think, however, (aside from my workout partner & the instructor) that the social atmosphere wasn't very good here either - I still felt like an outsider & not at home. I do wonder if in general, the evening classes welcome drop ins better than morning classes. Neither location in Phoenix that I went to held a candle to the social atmosphere pre & post WOD in CrossFit EPC - I really felt at home there, & I'm not forgetting that ever.
Other than scary stories (leaving my phone in an uber car & running 2 minutes before catching up with the driver), eating like a local, wishing the connecting flight from Philadelphia to Newark wasn't delayed 3 hours due to bad maintenance & no backup plan, appreciating Arizona summer weather, appreciating the best food service at Snooze & Grassroots, that's pretty much it for non-chess stuff. I'll talk about the two Monroi games, the opening round loss, & more in the next post.
Edit: 8/19 11:27 am. This post will be edited to talk about the other Ultimate group in the Northwest part of Phoenix that I forgot to talk about.
I would be remiss if I forgot to mention that I woke up early on Sunday August 9 to play Ultimate in the Northwest part of Phoenix. You can lookup Ultimate Frisbee - Northwest Valley on Facebook. This is a nice group that actually determines the teams before play. The interesting thing is that rather than rest players to go 7-on-7, all 18 of us were on the field. They play 2 games to 7 & then a sudden death game to 3 or 4. This is a really friendly group that has been playing for about 8 years. I mentioned that I got there by Uber, & one of them offered to drive me home if I installed Lyft on my phone. I did so & got a Lyft ride home. Sweet!
