When I was leaving Holbrook, I decided to stop for breakfast at a little diner down the road. It was named “Tom and Suzie’s Diner”, and this made me wonder: was it originally just Tom’s Diner? What’s the deal with Suzie? Is she the bank? Was there a shotgun involved? Fun speculation, but the amazing hot sauce seemed to indicate that it wasn’t a big deal.

The menu highlighted that since this was also a Route 66 town, the Wigwam Motel was a good stop, because it was allegedly the inspiration for the Cozy Cone Motel in Pixar movie Cars. They  had some cool antique vehicles outside!

I went to Petrified Forest National Park next. It was fun: most of the vistas along the road reminded me of a super-scaled-down version of the Grand Canyon, like it was just a practice version (or a different simulation?). They had a staff paleontologist working (he would have been more directly observable but with COVID, they put him on an intercom). He said that the park grew their paleontologist staff to 6 in recent years, which let some folks collect fossils in the field and others process them in-house. Sounds like it’s still a crowded profession, but they’re able to find more things now, so there’s some growth in the field too. Glad I’m over the dinosaur thing!

I thought it was a really fascinating example of behavioral economics that the park now sells petrified wood samples to try to help discourage straight up theft.

After leaving the park, I took a scenic route to Phoenix. I went through a small town, Show Low, because Bertie’s White Mountain Cafe & Donuts was the closest donut shop to Holbrook. I was super impressed by the menu food that I tried (sadly, the donuts were the weakest thing I had).

After that, I went through Tonto National Forest, and I was briefly confused where I was: all the pine/fir trees and mountains made me think I was in Oregon or Washington again. Then, all of a sudden, the soil went back to being red and I started seeing the saguaro cactuses that I learned about from Looney Toons (sadly,  I saw a less wily coyote yesterday as roadkill, perhaps clipped by an ACME car?). It was a real surprise in my final approach for Phoenix too: I rounded a curve on AZ-87, and there was a huge mountain range in front of me and then to the right, a large city.

I went to the Diamondbacks game. They are not having a great season, but the Giants are, and the fans seemed fairly evenly split (and this might have also done something to the ticket prices: the Rangers are the second worst team behind the Diamondbacks, and I expect to pay less than $15 / Red Wings prices for that ticket!). 

I was pleased that they also have a retractable roof at Chase Field, because a rain storm with visible lightning started half an hour or so before game time. Fireworks are about to start, so the roof is open again, even with some sprinkling. Also cool that for a relatively new stadium, they have a live organist for the games! The fireworks happened above the large Chase Field scoreboard, and immediately before, they were showing animation of fireworks on the scoreboard. I wasn't sure how the show would go, and it was good, but the live fireworks were not connected to the scoreboard/stadium lights, and they were generally not synched to the music (although they get points for using some "1812 Overture" for the finale and synching to that). Verdict: the 2014 Rock and Roll Fireworks I saw in Cleveland — with lasers and massive flames — remain the ballpark show to beat.