Quest of the Phoenix 2017 (7)

Part 7 of 11

By Nathan SturmPublished 7 years ago • 12 min read

Today I had what was only like an hour’s journey to Casa Grande where I would be switching hotels because…I dunno, just to see a bit more of Arizona, mainly the area south of Metro Phoenix. Thus I slept in, not rising until 6:45. Once again I got a nice breakfast courtesy of the motel and re-planned my routes; I was also pleased to discover that my clothes had dried properly overnight. Taking the first load of stuff out to my car, I found the housekeepers, a middle-aged Hindu couple, sitting on the hallway floor waiting for me to leave (due to the short drive today, I had pushed my departure time close to the 11 AM limit). I told them that I had to go back inside one more time, did so, and then gave them the go-ahead before returning my keycard and heading out.

Of course, my next hotel also had a check-in time of 3:00 PM, which means that I had slightly over four hours in which to make a one-hour drive. Or an hour and a half if I detoured to the town of Maricopa, which I wanted to have a look at. I could kill lots of time by driving down to Tucson and back (various people had recommended Tucson), but I hadn’t researched the layout of the city or what I might do there, in enough detail, so I would likely be limited to just darting in and out, and otherwise a bunch more driving. So I decided I wasn’t going to bother with Tucson. Sorry!

Instead, for now, I drove a bit around Mesa and and stopped at another fast-food chain which is absent from my home. I forget exactly what I ordered, a burger of some sort, and it was good, but more memorable was the unfortunate young man working the window, who had to have been on, like, his first or second day on the job. I originally gave him a $10 or $20 dollar bill, plus the exact-change amount of coinage necessary to only get paper back in change. Most drive-through personnel accept money with a “scooping” motion in expectation of this. It hadn’t occurred to him yet, however, so he grabbed the bill the way one would pull a receipt out of a gas pump or ATM, scattering the coins to the ground in the process.

“Sorry!” He said.

“That’s okay,” I replied, and allowed him to give me metallic change after all. I opened my car door and retrieved the quarter I’d dropped, but opted to donate the rest to the next bum who happened along.

The young man then handed me my food and told me to have a good day. “And a large Coke,” I said politely.

“Oh. Uh…$2.99,” he replied. I held up my receipt.

“I actually had that as part of a combo.” He winced visibly.

“Oh. Okay…” After getting me the drink, he again told me to have a nice day, now avoiding even the possibility of eye contact.

“Thanks,” I said, and drove off into the nearest parking-lot agglomeration to eat my BRUNCH (since it was only about 11:00). Reflecting on the boy’s misfortune reminded me of how much I actually DON’T miss being a teenager — you never know what the hell you’re doing, and everything has the potential to be an embarrassing fiasco (especially since all the hormonal crap makes everything seem more “emotional” than need be). In other words, almost every day threatens to be like my other night in Vegas there. For me, nowadays, that particular night was an anomaly.

I then drove (slowly) south through the remainder of Mesa and into Chandler. Chandler was, I’d say, the nicest of all the PHX suburbs I’d seen. It was clearly a middle-class sort of place, and appeared fairly clean and safe, but not as absurdly ritzy as Scottsdale, and there were minor telltale signs of a decent cultural scene. Not to mention, pretty much ALL the buildings (elsewhere, only some) were some shade of BROWN (or peach-ish beige). By now I’m pretty sure I’ve seen enough shades of blue, green, and grey in Michigan to last a lifetime, and I like browns better anyway. Towards the far south of Chandler (and Metro Phoenix generally) was the community of Sun Lakes, which veered back towards being a pretentious retirement village for wealthy people, however. It was still “nice” though in a more artificial way, since there was an awful lot of imported water and greenery everywhere, as though the residents were vaguely ashamed of living in the desert. I’d heard that a lot of people around here (especially transplants from other states) were, sadly, fond of using the Valley’s warm climate as a template on which to recreate some other, less-arid place — Miami, L.A., Cancún-for-Old-Farts, something like that. Personally, I’d love to have a lawn made of GRAVEL (as many people here did). You don’t have to waste gas on a machine that kills half the insects and small toads living in your yard, meanwhile scattering pollen throughout the air, all for the sake of giving GRASS (the most boring plant on Earth) a HAIRCUT once per week or so. Who the hell thought of the idea of “lawns” to begin with?

Then I was back out in the wasteland, in or near the Gila River Indian Reservation, bearing first west, and then south again towards the town of Maricopa. Here the immediate landscape was flat, but there were low mountains on the horizon in most every direction, so that was cool.

Maricopa (which, ironically, lies slightly outside of Maricopa County) was almost surreal, albeit in a “good” way. How, HOW is any place able to seem like such a perfect small town? More on this in a moment. Driving through it, I found myself looking for places to waste time — for one thing, a car-wash would be nice, since my (white) car looked an awful lot like it had just driven through 2,500 miles of rain, ice, and dirt, and my next hotel was apparently a more upscale sort of place. Before that, though, I saw a sign pointing towards the local post office and pulled in there. I still had to mail my postcard to Tina. It was Sunday, so I just wrote a bit on the card in the parking lot and dropped it in the blue box. Then I found a car-wash place almost right next door and paid $6 for a fairly basic wash at some sort of electronic terminal; almost the whole process was automated, aside from when a guy helped direct me onto the conveyor-belt thingies that guide your vehicle through the corridor-of-weirdness while you keep your gear in neutral. I had, actually, never done this before. My former car was such a P.O.S. that there was no point in washing it, not to mention we get enough rain back home to take care of the worst of it, anyway. There were many “firsts” on this trip.

With my vehicle mostly spiffied up, I pulled into a gas station for fuel and peeing. A road leading beyond the station went by something that looked like it might be a movie theater, which would be a good way to continue wasting time. It wasn’t (some kind of “recreation center”), but adjacent was a nice little park. I parked my car and had a walk around. Again, I was struck by the extent to which this town looked like it had been manufactured by Hollywood; I might as well have wandered onto a movie set (albeit, idyllic little towns like this are usually the settings for horror or disaster films). It was isolated (though not very far from Phoenix) and geographically distinct, like movie towns; back home every small town has an endless bleed-over area of “subrural” human settlement that in turn bleeds into the next town or city, making it hard to say where anyone is actually “from” unless they live right in downtown or something, which in turn subverts the cliche about “everyone knows everyone else” because in fact everyone knows some people from all over the amalgamated general area. It was pristine; I’d read somewhere that most of it was fairly new. And in the most Hollywood-esque touch of all, it seemed to have a fairly even balance of every major racial and ethnic group, as opposed to being 99.7% white, which, admit it or not, is what we (stereo)typically expect of nice, little towns. Truly bizarre, but I liked the place.

After the park I drove further south back into the boonies, passing a recently-built casino most likely associated with the nearby Ak-Chin Indian Community, and also some agricultural fields. The Valley of the Sun actually got its start as a modern human settlement on the basis of FARMING, since a sufficiently warm desert does make a good place to grow crops provided people have heard about this “irrigation” business. I then turned around and drove back through Maricopa from the other direction, this time aiming to get lunch from yet another new restaurant. This time I chose someplace I’d never even heard of, which apparently specialized in burgers and frozen desserts but also had Chicago Dogs on the menu. I got one of these (and a brownie sundae) to make up for having failed to find a Sonoran Dog in Phoenix. Holy CRAP, was it ever good. So many VEGETABLES. On the downside, I had now eaten three meals by 1:30 in the afternoon, and was feeling a bit like passing out for a nice fatness nap.

I then took a highway heading southeast for Casa Grande, where my hotel lay. Departing the main road through Maricopa I discovered that the town did have some less-than-tidy-or-prosperous-looking neighborhoods, which at least confirmed that it was real and not a film-set about to be destroyed by computer-generated giant ants. Then I was back again in the semi-agricultural desert for a bit. My hotel was a bit west of the town proper, so I took a cross-street that I hoped would intercept it. Which turned out to be a dirt road, so I drove VERY SLOWLY to minimize any dust-kickup that would might spit in the face of my recent carwash. Emerging onto another highway I entered Casa Grande, which was…meh. It was okay, I guess, just a tad dumpy and ghettofied, otherwise a fairly generic American large town/small city. I was about 95% sure I’d missed my hotel, so I pulled into a McDonald’s to get more of their reliably uniform coffee and poop out some of the excess food I’d eaten. I failed in the latter objective, however, since the place only had one stall and some guy remained in it for like the whole 20 minutes I was there. Instead I went out to my car, texted some people, and finally headed back west. It was now 2:30 or so. Check-in was at 3. WOULD I MANAGE to waste enough time?

No. I found the hotel only about ten minutes later. It was even swankier than I was expecting — like, the whole place was basically a vacation unto itself, and I wasn’t quite sure why I had gotten it for the same price I paid for my relatively basic lodgings in Mesa. It was actually a GOLF RESORT. I have no interest in golf, and I hoped no one would like, hold that against me and wonder why I was taking up space that was meant to be occupied by old, fat, rich golfers. Fortunately I was wearing semi-nice clothes.

The lobby was REALLY nice, with marble and shit, and checking in (apologizing for being 15 minutes early, though it didn’t seem to be an issue) one of the ladies at the front desk said something about how “Oh, and your debit card is approved for Something Something Something.” I stared blankly at her until she re-clarified it in another version of Rich-People Hotel-Speak, which I nodded at and pretended to understand, this time around. She then gave me my keycard for my room on the third floor (the hotel was actually a bit of a tower) and told me that the elevator was back behind the painting over there. BEHIND THE PAINTING. I had escaped the horror-film set of Maricopa only to find myself in a movie about nouveau-riche yuppies who get mixed up in the intrigues of a transnational spy agency.

Arriving at my room, I discovered that it was very pleasant and well-decorated, but did not actually have any more accommodations than any other place I’d stayed in (which was fine). In fact, disturbingly, it had neither a fridge nor a microwave. I still had my leftover Udon noodles from last night. There had to be a microwave somewhere. There just had to. Preferably not in the lobby, though, since I’d brought in half of my stuff in plastic grocery bags and being seen microwaving leftovers would make me look even more like a pleb who had no business being here.

Even on the second floor, where there was supposedly vending and ice machines (which I never found), there was no microwave. Thus it was with a heavy heart that I added to the disappointments of not getting to see the interior of a Vegas casino, and not going to the Phoenix Film Festival, and not visiting Tucson, that I also had to actually throw away leftover Asian food. Other than that, though, I had a pleasant and relaxing evening. The bathroom had very nice faux-stone tiles (or maybe genuine stone, I dunno) and some sort of green-tea based soap and shampoo. And there was this leather-bound folder-thing advertising the various facilities on the hotel’s grounds and accommodations available to the guests.

Included in the leather folder was mention of ROOM SERVICE.

Incidentally, since I had no idea what the protocol for this sort of thing was, I hastily tried to look it up on Google after I’d already ordered my lovely Chicken Marsala dinner, and the polite gentleman who brought it to me unpretentiously told me, after I asked, that when finished I could just leave the dishes on the floor outside my door, and someone would pick it up later. Despite the fact that my bill (which was around twice what I’d normally pay at a restaurant) included a “gratuity”, I nevertheless tipped him a few extra dollars for his helpful guidance and restraint in not sounding the Pleb Alarm which would summon rich people to bodily throw me out of their establishment.

After enjoying this unprecedented level of luxury with a vague feeling of guilt and embarrassment (not to mention bloatedness, as it was meal #4 of the day), I engaged in my usual ritual of double-checking my route for tomorrow, reading, and passing out early. Tomorrow, I had a drive long enough to rival, if not exceed, the vast distance I had crossed on Day 1.