The Brad Hole

On Saturday, Beth and I went to the Desert Botanical Garden on a whim. We were going to visit the Phoenix Zoo, but it was closing in an hour and admission was $12 a person, so we didn't think we'd get the best bang for our buck.

It has probably been at least 10 years since I last visited the DBG, and it had changed quite a bit since the last time. For starters, it looks nice and modern now. It's quite scenic, more than you'd think and definitely more than I remembered.

The guy who gave us our tickets wondered about my t-shirt; it said "Venetian gondola assoc." and was one I'd picked up when we were in Vegas. I explained this to him and he told us an amusing story about his trip to the Venetian. He and his wife were eating there in the evening and left one of the restaurants in the mall inside the Venetian. She made the comment that for 9:30pm, the sky sure was bright out. The amusing part is that in the mall, the sky is painted on the ceiling.

We got the tail end of a bonus at the garden - they were having some sort of Chilis and Chocolate festival with a variety of booths set up in the park and a cooking demonstration. We sat in on the cooking, which was for some chili chocolate tart thing. It was really, really good - the chili is used in very small moderation and really brought out the full flavor of the chocolate. Even Beth, who is not a fan of chocolate, liked the taste.

So we walked around the park, saw the various types of cacti, visited the bee and butterfly nooks, saw some hummingbirds, visited the "Desert House" and saw a garden stocked with things that grow here (that was more interesting than it sounds), and in general had a relaxing time walking around. There was live music, and in general a very artsy-fartsy atmosphere. It suited the part very well.

They have some sort of holiday luminaria thing coming up that looks interesting, so we might try to go to that. We went to the "Zoolights" at the Phoenix Zoo last year, and it was a lot of fun, as those things go. ;-) There was one part of Zoolights where they had these 4 or 5 trees lit up across the lake, and each tree would light up in different colors and pulse in time with, IIRC, the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt.