The drive through Arizona into Blythe was fairly quick, only a couple hours.  We loaded up on gas and went right back on the highway for another couple hours until Indio, where we stopped for breakfast/lunch at McDonalds and to switch driving duties.  To not waste any time, we ate in the car and again, went right back on the highway.  After Indio we ended up in a little sandstorm.  It was really windy like it had been on the way to Arizona a week ago, only this time the wind was throwing sand at the car.  We could hear it pelting off the windshield.  A few minutes into that, droplets of water started coming down too.  We drove out of the sandy area and continued on, all the way through the LA area and almost through the Grapevine before stopping.

Right before the Grapevine ends, we stopped at the rest area in Lebec.  It was cold outside, a real change from the past week.  It started snowing, with small flakes fluttering down.  As soon as they touched anything, they disappeared.  Within a few minutes, however, the snow turned into hail and the wind picked up.  It wasn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but it was still fun to see.

The rest of the trip home was fairly uneventful.  Hunter slept most of the way from Buttonwillow, where we stopped for an early dinner.  Lots of 18 wheelers on I5 made it slower than normal since everyone has to move over to get around them.  But we finally pulled into the driveway… and are looking forward to a relaxing Monday.

It was a quicker game than all the rest so we actually got back to the hotel pretty quick.  We don’t have anything else planned since we’d like to get to bed early tonight.  If we can wake up early enough and get rolling, we might be at home by bedtime tomorrow.  Off to dinner and to organize our stuff for the car!

We saw lots of animals and took a decent amount of pictures.  I think my best photos today were of the orangutan yawning, the groudhog eating, and the plant life.  The cactus and flowers just seem like great photos with the framing and colors.  You can check out the photos here.

We left the Zoo and went to Papago Park, which was right next door.  There are some neat rock formations to climb on.  We picked one with a hole in the side near the top.  We threw hunter in his hiking backpack and started off to the rock.  Once in the hole on the side, we took some pictures of the view.  I also climbed outside of the hole and up the side until I got to the very top of the rock.  One of these days I’ll stitch the ring of photos I took all into one.

After Papago Park, we went back to the hotel to let Hunter take a cool bath.  He played in the ducky bath and had a lot of fun splashing around.  For dinner, we drove to downtown Phoenix and ate at an Irish pub and watched some NCAA basketball games.  I had the fish and chips and Heather had some shepherd’s pie for the first time.  She liked it.  We did make a stop at Denny’s for some desert and then back to the hotel.

Tomorrow we have the last baseball game where the A-Team play host to the G-Men.

It was nice and comfortable while walking under the second level on the concourse.  Back in the seats, however, it felt warm and cramped.  Like most places, the seats are a little too small and close together.  I think being in the back row helped a little since we got a breeze coming from the walkway behind us.  The temperature was in the low 90’s during the game and it felt like it while in the sun when the breeze stopped.  We also saw clouds for the first time since we got here about a week ago, but that didn’t help the temperature much.

The game started off okay when the A’s put up four runs in the first inning, but Texas came back and scored six in the third.  They didn’t have to look back and went on to win 8-5.  There were a lot of A’s fans there today.  At a few points in the game, the “Let go Ran-gers” chant turned into a “Let’s go Oak-land” chant.

Hank Blalock tried to catch a foul ball but instead flipped over the rail into the A’s dugout.  He smacked his head on something and they treated his cut a little in the A’s dugout before he walked to the Ranger’s locker room.

I noticed it at Phoenix Muni and here again; most of the stadium workers and attendees are retirement age men and women.  Not too surprising since Arizona is a big retirement spot.  The only one of them that didn’t seem happy was one today who manned our seating area.  I guess he didn’t like the people who walked themselves to their seat without his help.

For dinner we went to Buffalo Wild Wings and watched some of the NCAA games.  I think I had three of the four games correct on my bracket.  We ate some ‘chicken strings’ which are probably just processes chicken squeezed through some kind of play-doh like contraption so they look like strings.  They tasted pretty good though.  We had two sauces, one Asian and the other Caribbean jerk.  Both were a little spicy, so by the time my hot wings (only regular hot, not wild hot) arrived, my taste buds were already opened.  I went through three refills of my soda keeping the fire down in my mouth.  They were pretty good though.  Heather had some kind of flatbread chicken pizza thing and she liked it.

After dinner we drove the hour back to the hotel.  In the Denny’s parking lot next to the hotel there were six police cars, all parked rear-first into their spots.  I know they sometimes like to take their meal breaks together, but I’ve never seen so many at one place at the same time.

Tomorrow we will spend the day at the Phoenix Zoo in Papago Park.  If we get there early enough and finish it with enough time, we might cross the street and hike the Papago rock formations.  I hope it’s not too hot either, as we really want to try out our new hiking backpack with Hunter.

At the park, we saw giraffes, zebras, ostrich, a couple different types of antelope, a camel, lions, tigers and bears!  Oh, and also two newborn goats, only six hours old!  They were already walking around.  The first thing they have you do is ride in the open air buses through their Serengeti enclosure.  They give you little cookie-like treats for the giraffe, and it will come up to the bus to take it from your hand.  Heather helped Hunter hold onto it and the giraffe took the cookie right from his hand.  We did it twice, and I don’t think he noticed either time.

As our bus was coming up to another giraffe, we saw the driver of the bus on the way back stop, and the driver hopped out the door and ran down the road toward the giraffe.  Apparently, the giraffe had picked up one of the baby goats in it’s mouth and dropped it from about fence height.  Our driver said that the giraffe didn’t want to hurt the baby goat but was only curious.  She said that giraffe are always curious about babies and will follow baby wildebeasts and others out in the wild.

After the tour, we took the tram up to the top of the hill to watch the Tiger Splash.  Before we got to the arena area, we stopped and took pictures of two large constrictor snakes.  They look really neat and feel nice and scaly, but not rough or slimy.

At the Tiger Splash, they have two tigers and a bunch of workers who tease and taunt the tigers with balloons and sports balls, trying to get them to jump into the water.  Tigers naturally like swimming, so it’s not like they didn’t want to be in the water.  For about a half-hour, the tigers popped balloons and balls and played much like housecats do.  They even had one of the trainers attacked in a playful way by one of the tigers, but tigers have claws, and sometimes they accidentally hurt people.  Today, the trainer got a big scratch behind his ear from the claw, but he was just fine and continued to play with it.

When the show concluded, they started to let people feed the tigers.  The person stands on one side of the fence and one of the workers puts a piece of meat on a pole so you can hold it up through the fence for the tiger to eat.  Heather and I both fed the tiger while holding Hunter.  When I held him he started getting excited and made some noises.  The tiger also made some noises while people were feeding him.  It sounds like a larger version of what some cats will sound like when they’re not meowing, but still vocalizing.

The rest of the park has a lot of big cats in different fields.  Bengal and Siberian tigers, as well as White tigers and lions.  We also saw a panther and a jaguar.  Near the end of the road down the hill I took some pictures of a rhino resting near some brush.  We got back to the bottom of the road and decided not to go back up the other way since most of the animals were duplicated and it was hot out.

Back at the car, we decided we had enough time to go to Sedona.  The drive there is very pretty with the red rocks and mountains carved out long ago.  We didn’t get to take too many photos since we were reaching our limit on the card.  Into Sedona, we stopped and ate at a mexican restaurant.  Shortly after we sat down, a family of four with two girls sat down next to our table.  They were about 10 or 12, and Hunter kept turning around to smile and talk to them.  After we ate, we walked down the street a little and browsed the shops.  The sun set and we knew it was time to head back.  Almost two hours later and we made it.

Tomorrow we get to drive to Suprise, Arizona to watch the A’s play the Texas Rangers.

We got a few autographs in the Spring edition of the A’s Magazine and our Spring Training ball. Gio Gonzales, Daric Barton, Josh Outman, Rajai Davis, Cliff Pennington and Corey Wimberly.  Not really any big names, but guys to watch in the future.  I don’t think I got any great pictures, though I did get a few of Reggie Jackson who was in his full practice gear.

The game went well for the A’s, who had a 5-0 lead leaving the first inning.  Both teams were shut down until the sixth, when the Diamondbacks were able to score two off of Vince Mazzaro and then another  in the seventh.   The A’s did score four more in the middle of that and two more in the seventh with help by a Josh Donaldson triple and a solo home run by Aaron Cunningham.  The final score was 11-3.

After the game, we headed back to the hotel for a short bit before leaving for Jobing.com Arena to watch the visiting Sharks take on the Phoenix Coyotes.  We were a little late and missed the first goal, but they saved two more Phoenix goals for when we were in our seats.  The Sharks were down 3-0 going into the first intermission, and were only able to score one in the second period.  As they have done more than a few times this year, the Sharks scored twice to tie the game in the third.  Unfortunately, a really bad interference call on Cheechoo by the referee resulted in a Sharks penalty and the Coyotes capitalized to score with thirty seconds to go in the game and take a 4-3 lead.

Hunter was a little less excited today than he was yesterday.  Still, he smiled at people when they would talk to him.  While getting autographs down near the field, Hunter got to shake Daric Barton’s hand.  I wish I had been able to take a picture of that.  Everyone though he was so cute at the hockey game in the Sharks jacket that we borrowed from his cousins.

Tomorrow we go to Out of Africa, a wild animal park about 90 minutes north of Phoenix.  We’re going to try and get there early so we can possibly drive up to Sedona for dinner and check out the views.

Phoenix Municipal is a pretty nice park.  Attendance was 5,303 people.  They say it can hold 8775 people, but it seemed like there was more people than 60% capacity, so maybe they count the standing room only limits.  It’s not too hard to get around in and the food lines don’t get too long since there are so many counters open.  About the only thing that it lacks is the variety of food.  Standard baseball fare here for the most part.  It also doesn’t have any outfield seating or picnic area like many other minor league and spring training facilities have.  I hope the city of Phoenix takes Lew Wolfe up on his offer to renovate and adds some outfield stuff and perhaps a new scoreboard.

I didn’t get any autographs today.  We didn’t get there early enough and really were just trying to get our bearings on the place by the time the players came off the field.  There’s a practice field right over the right field wall, and I got to see Giambi take some easy pitches from one of the coaches, and Ellis hit off a tee.  The catchers, Landon Powell and Kurt Suzuki were also practicing their catching and throw-em-out motions.  Tomorrow we’ll try to get there earlier and get some autographs.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, mentioned how cute Hunter was in his A’s onesie and hat.  We even had a couple of Japanese girls take turns snapping their pictures with him.  We were in the front row of the covered spots about a section or two over from home plate.  It was a pretty good view of the field and of Papago Park behind it.  Since we were in the front row, everyone had a good view of Hunter.  He talked a lot and was ‘yelling’ at people as they went by, especially the young kids.  A few people stopped with their young ones to say ‘Hi.’

While walking around we saw sportswriter Mychael Urban eating lunch in the VIP area.  He’s pretty tall.  Lew  also came out to sign some autographs and shake hands.  The Left Field Bleachers people were there and kept telling him to keep the team in Oakland.  He ignored it.

After the game, we drove up to Scottsdale and ate at The Saddle Ranch Chop House for dinner.  It was nice to actually eat dinner before eight o’clock for the first time in three days.  I had a steak with garlic mashed potatoes and Heather ate an orange chicken dish.  They were great, as were the cornbread muffins and buffalo wings.  The manager of the place actually called my mustache a ‘Rollie Fingers thing’ so that was good.  It looks like it would be a great place to go to watch a game, as they have TVs all over and the place is really spacious.

Tomorrow is game two, vs the Arizona Diamondbacks, so I expect it to have higher attendance than today.  Also, sunscreen.

We left at ten o’clock and drove about ten minutes to California Speedway.  Unfortunately, it was gated off so we couldn’t get any good pictures.  A few minutes later we were on I10, which goes all the way to Phoenix.  The first part of the trip was fairly routine, but Hunter didn’t stay asleep for long.  He entertained himself with his toys. The way to Palm Springs has a lot of windmills.  Huge ones, little ones… just fields of them.  Most of them were churning away.  We hopped off the freeway at Palm Springs to get gas.  It almost windy enough to blow hats off heads.  I could see why they put all those windmills there.  We stopped down the road a bit in Desert Palms to get Heather some new jeans, since the ones she wanted to wear were baby-pukey.  Back on the road, we headed toward Blythe.

Halfway to Blythe, Hunter started fussing so we pulled over to let him eat and stretch after being cooped up in his carseat for so long.  He was so happy to be out and playing with mommy.  Unfortunately, that all ended when we needed to get back to the road.  He fussed most of the rest of the way to Blythe, but since he finally fell asleep, we decided to get something fast to eat for lunch and keep driving for as long as we could.  Since we weren’t going to eat inside someplace,  I had to stretch my legs before we got back on the freeway.  We stopped in a lot near the onramp back to the freeway and I stretched a bit.  Hunter woke up and continued his fussing before we were back on the road.

Once passed Blythe, we crossed the calm Colorado River.  Of course, so far south it isn’t very interesting.  It’s interesting how it’s easy to notice that you’ve just entered into a different place.  It didn’t seem so smoggy or hazy, and the rocks seemed to be a different shade.  Since Hunter was awake and fussy, we stopped at the first rest area to stretch, then continued on.  It’s pretty much a straight drive through Arizona.  Only a few times does the road actually bend a little or go up in elevation.  Since the little guy eventually fell asleep, we bypassed the next rest stop, but we did stop at the third, about an hour from Phoenix.  We were actually surprised that all three were open.  We found that in California, about half of the rest areas were closed for maintenance.

Traffic picked up once we got into the more suburban areas.  We saw the results of a multi-car accident that I am sure we missed by less than a minute.  I think about seven or eight cars were involved.  The speed didn’t pick up after we passed it, however, and we found out that the reason it happened in the first place was an accident about a half mile ahead.  Cars had been slowing for that one when they created the one we saw.  Before we had even known about it, I decided to tell the GPS that we wanted the best route that wasn’t on the highway.  It calculated a parallel route that we could take until the freeway traffic picked up.  I edged over to the right lane and took the next exit as the highway went up an overpass.  Waiting at the bottom of the exit, we could see a couple RVs and a few cars, as well as a couple fire engines and ambulances.  Since they were at the top of the overpass, I just went straight back onto the freeway and saved us ten or twenty minutes.  A mile down the road, what did we see?  A third multi-car accident on the next offramp.

Civilization rose up around us and soon we were in Phoenix.  We pulled into the hotel parking lot with a few minutes to spare before the sun set.  After unsuccessfully driving around to find a pizza place, we took a fussy baby back to the hotel and ate dinner at the next-door Denny’s.  For as much as I usually have them down the list of places to go to eat, they’ve really got a good menu.  We might have to go back later in the week so I can try one or two more things.

Heather and Hunter have passed out on the bed.  I don’t think we’re setting an alarm clock for tomorrow, since the first thing we have to do is the baseball game between the A’s and Dodgers, and that doesn’t start until 1pm.  So as long as Hunter is sleeping, we’ll be sleeping.

So yea.  Baseball tomorrow!

We planned on leaving at about nine am this morning, but we had a missing kitty to find.  We weren’t sure if she had snuck outside while we were packing the car, so we couldn’t leave until we knew where she was.  It turned out she was spooked by the vacuum as I cleaned the car out and she hid in our bedroom under the comforter.  Anyway, we finally got on the road about ten o’clock and headed toward I5.

Driving down the main north-south highway isn’t too exciting.  We did see some workers performing some kind of operation on one of those giant power line towers along I5.  It was completely off on two of the four corners and suspended by a giant crane.  We went by it so fast we didn’t get a chance to see snap a photo.  Hunter slept the whole three hours to Coalinga before waking up and then played with his toys until we arrived in Buttonwillow for lunch.  We ate at Tita’s Mexican and had awesome bean and cheese pupusas.  It was our second time visiting Tita’s on an I5 drive.

After that, we decided to change up our travel itinerary.  Instead of driving down I5 to 210 and over to Ontario, we decided to head east through Bakersfield and over Tehachapi to Mojave.  It was a different drive than the urban 210.  Pretty views, though there was a lot of smoggy air so we could only see the outlines of the mountains in the distance until we got closer.  Heather was disappointed there wasn’t more sand.  Instead it was just lots of shrubbery.  South on 395 we made out third stop of the day to feed a hungry little one and stretch some legs.  We drove by Maverick Stadium on 395, the home of the High Desert Mavericks, the Single-A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners.  We expected it to be warmer in the Mojave Desert, but it was quite cool.  Probably just the time of the year.

Shortly after that, we drove through the Cajon pass and into the LA area.  Our hotel is in Ontario near the Ontario Mills Mall, which reminds me of the Great Mall in Milpitas.  Unfortunately, the room smelled like someone had been smoking, which was odd because the entire hotel is a non-smoking facility.  The second room is much better.

Overall, not a terribly exciting day, but it was neat to drive through a places we’ve never driven before and see the difference scenery.  Up tomorrow, we go east up Highway 10 through Blythe and into Arizona.  We should be in Phoenix by the afternoon.

You can see some pictures here on Facebook.