20 SEPTEMBER 2012: PHOENIX, ARIZONA

Day 5:
GETTING THERE
The taxi driver we found this morning to take us to the aiport was a fount of knowledge on Obama (good) and US medical insurance companies (VERY bad). Steve started him off, and away he went.
Chimed with another conversation yesterday about the evils of the American banking system. Californians are very keen to share their views, highly articulate and, so far, pretty left-wing. Arizona will be different.
Checking into Los Angeles airport would try the patience of a saint......no customer service here. Few humans either, as you struggle to get the machines to respond before you are timed-out. And amazingly the couple struggling with the machine next to us were from Dublin and had just done a similar Grand Canyon guided tour as we're booked in for tomorrow! The Irish turn up everywhere.

DOWNTOWN PHOENIX

Taxi driver No. 2 today (from Phoenix Airport to the hotel) was very different to this morning's: an Iraqi, probably in his mid-50s, who wanted to know how much we thought it would cost him to rent a one-bedroom flat in any part of London that was about an hour's journey from the centre. Why?? Because he fancied himself to be an exceptional football coach who'd been praised by Paul Mariner no less (here we told him we'd seen Paul Mariner play for Ipswich back in the days when we lived in Suffolk) and who wanted to become a Coach for Derby County!! If the conversation had been less surreal we probably would have asked him why a flat in London, not one in Derby.......but somehow it didn't seem the thing to ask.
But at least he knew the way to the hotel.
San Carlos Hotel:

www.hotelsancarlos.com
We're booked in tonight into this hotel, not least because Sue was intrigued by the Moon Guide saying it 'brings back the golden-age of big city hotels'. It opened in 1928 and became a favourite stop of Hollywood stars during the first half of the 20th century, being one of the first high-rise hotels in the Southwest with full air-conditioning and electric elevators.

Heritage Square:
Q. What do you do on a warm Thursday afternoon in Phoenix? ('Warm' ??? Fox TV tells us it's 102 degrees here today.)
A. Walk downtown to look at some Victorian houses.
In the mid-1970s the Phoenix City Council decided to clean-up an area that was riddled with crime and, at the same time, rescue and renovate some buildings that remained as testament to Phoenix's Victorian past. With the coming of the railroad to Phoenix in the 1880s, building materials other than mud and rocks had become available: adobe huts were replaced by red-brick houses.
THE ROSSON HOUSE: was built in 1895 at a cost of $7,525. We took a guided tour with a lady dressed as a maid. Eerily reminiscent of the Black Country Museum!

THE SILVA HOUSE: built in 1900 by a liquor dealer, ironically it's now home to the 'Rose and Crown', serving traditional English pub food like bangers and mash!