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.

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.

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!