Right after Christmas in 2014, we made a week long trek to Phoenix, Arizona to visit relatives. The RV parks we stayed in on our way there, in Phoenix and during our return were not very interesting. I’ll briefly mention the one in Phoenix only because we stayed there for four days. The other two were one night we need a place to stay campgrounds.
While in Phoenix we stayed at Desert’s Edge RV Village. The hook to get you in there is “The Purple Park Experience”. Everything they could paint purple was purple. They even have a purple golf putting green. I haven’t seen that much purple since the neighbor kid briefly choked on a piece of meat before coughing it out. The sites were clean, level and had full hookups. The park has the usual amenities offered by private RV parks: playground, swimming pool, dog park, laundry facilities, small general store and so on. It’s located in north Phoenix just off I-17, so it’s fairly close to everything by Phoenix standards. Phoenix is huge! It always seems to me like it takes at least 1 hour to get anywhere.
I guess we are spoiled. Private RV parks like this just don’t compare to National, State and County campgrounds in our opinion. Nothing negative intended about the Desert’s Edge, it’s just not the kind of place we like to stay anymore. It’s located in an industrial park-like area, but it felt safe. We weren’t inspired take any photographs of the park.
On to other things. In addition to catching up with relatives, we visited a couple of interesting places.
The first place we visited was the Desert Botanical Garden located in south Phoenix. If you like desert plants, this is the place. Look closely and you’ll see a lot of birds and butterflies too. If you are lucky, you might be able to see a Western Screech owl sticking its head out of a Saguro cactus! It has a pleasant oasis with a pond and shade that you can stop for a nice break. There are a couple of places that you can stop to have a bite to eat too. It is a peaceful and relaxing place. Near the Christmas holidays (between November and December), they usually will do a night event. Last year it was the Las Noches de las Luminarias, which had over 8,000 hand lit luminaria bags throughout the gardens. But the event was sold out during our visit to Phoenix so unfortunately we were not able to visit it in the evening.
The second place we visited is the largest of it’s kind (global instrument museum) in the world! It’s the Musical Instrument Museum and it is fabulous. We couldn’t get through the museum in one day. We had heard about this museum and honestly, it did not sound very exciting to see a bunch instruments but was highly recommended so we thought we would give it a try. Boy were we surprised! It is a very interesting, engaging and wonderful museum that we highly recommend you should visit anytime you are in Phoenix. You will need a full day. We got there late morning and were not able to see everything before they closed. Fascinating to see the history of instruments from so many countries, including some countries which we never heard of.
We’ll have to take a trip back to Phoenix to finish seeing it.
Dents and Filiform 