On Saturday, the wife and I headed down to Tucson for the Arizona Beer Fest, Tucson Edition. (Their website is pretty flaky.) Paul, Maureen, Paul's sister Lise and Erwin joined us, and it ended up being a lot of fun. A blow-by-blow account follows.
We left Phoenix around 11:45 and met everyone else at Gentle Ben's Bar and Grill, right near the U of A campus. I'd only been down to the campus area once before (that I recall) and that was almost 15 years ago. Gentle Ben's had OK food and slightly below-average beer. According to Maureen, this was a classic campus dive back when she went to U of A. They've upgraded from dive to "nice, yet independent" since then - the old building was torn down and a new one build in its place, so I'm told a lot of the "dive" factor is no longer present.
After this, we had a few hours before we could check in to the hotel, so we wandered the campus, saw some African heritage festival, listened to a guy play a flute while riding a bike with no hands (and nearly getting smashed while doing so through an intersection), We visited the gift shop for the U of A planetarium. In here, I was transfixed by one of these super-cheesy, super-cheap plastic brain teaser puzzles where you roll this steel ball through a plastic maze. As I nearly completed the puzzle, Maureen jerked my arm (on purpose) and had a good laugh at my expense. Unbeknownst to me, she felt slightly guilty and bought the puzzle to give to me later as a surprise gift as we were leaving the U of A campus. Beth took great delight in jerking the car around as we drove to the hotel so that I could not complete the puzzle. Oy vey!
We checked in at the Clarion Randolph Park. This was an older hotel, and looked it. It also featured the world's slowest elevator. We discovered that we could easily take the stairs up to the third floor and beat the elevator without really rushing our pace. If we go again next year, we may try the Doubletree down the street, and net ourselves 2 cookies and some Hilton miles in the process.
The main reason for choosing this hotel was so we could walk to the beer fest. As it turns out, we ended up walking down the wrong side of the park and had to backtrack about half a mile, then walk perhaps another mile to mile and a half to the park. Next time, we'll probably avail ourselves of the free taxi service from the beer fest. We were contemplating getting the VIP tickets (and thus early entry) but our misdirection pretty much nixed that plan. As it turns out, that was for the best - the VIP area wasn't all that special, and if we had to pay an extra $25 a person for it, it probably would have been a rip-off.
They gave us 24 tickets and a plastic mug with a sample line about 1.25 inches up from the bottom. As it turns out, most vendors didn't bother taking our tickets, and most filled up well past the sample line. Net result: it was pretty much all the beer you could drink for $25. They also were giving out free Pizza Hut pizza, Krispy Kreme donuts, water, potato chips, peanuts and a few other things. Aside from a complete lack of seating outside of the VIP area, it was about all you could ask for.
The beer ran the gamut from super-skanky to mighty fine. Not one to waste, I decided that when I hit the skanky stuff, I'd just chug it down as quickly as possible. This spawned a motto: "all of the buzz with none of the taste". As I was pontificating about this, a girl overhead me and proclaimed that this was indeed a fine motto to use for those skanky beers. At least, that's what I dimly remember - I was totally loaded by then and was lucky to still be standing.
I'm not sure where they were selling t-shirts for this year's event, but they were unloading shirts from prior years - 3 for $10. Being completely blitzed, I thought this was a fine bargain and picked some up. In hindsight, I suppose they'd be good for yard work or something; wearing a "1997 Beer Fest" shirt when I didn't attend is pretty dumb. :-)
I loaded up on water and ibuprofen before crashing, after what seemed like an interminable death march back to the hotel. The alarm in our room was set to go off at 5 am (to Mexican radio, no less). This was unplanned. :-) After fumbling with the radio, we slept and re-awoke around 9 am for the "hot breakfast buffet." Like "Stoner's Pot Palace", this turned out to be a flagrant case of false advertising - room temperature eggs, hash browns, orange juice and pancakes were on deck. The eggs were scrambled and contained some meat (no one is sure if it's bacon, sausage or ham), the pancakes were rock hard. Worse, the surly server told Paul that they were out of pancakes, and when I went to refill on eggs a moment later, I found out that, in fact, they had a whole tray full of around 20 of them. In this case, ignorance would have been bliss. The general consensus among our party was that the fine folks at the Clarion should have paid us for this breakfast, if only to cover what would surely be upcoming related medical expenses.
Woo, this is taking a while, isn't it? ;-)
Anyway, we cut our losses and went to breakfast at some place called "Coffee Xtreme" (?) and had some bagels, scones and drinks, then paid a visit to Bookman's. After some time there, we walked around some mall in north Tucson and had a very late lunch at the Thunder Canyon Brewing Company (yes, more beer - but this certainly wasn't a selling point to us after Saturday night). I didn't care so much for the food, but Lise got a sample of their Bees n Berries Beer, and it was shockingly good, even after our taste buds had been blasted by alcohol the night before. At this point, I could go a long long time without tasting another beer.