Day 6: Phoenix, AZ
Welcome
Yesterday we played our third show of the tour in Phoenix, Arizona.
I started my day with a bowl of Reese’s Puffs, a corn-based breakfast cereal that I served in a paper bowl with 2% fat milk.
There were a range of different activities enjoyed by members of our tour party across the morning. I did some writing and then went out for a run followed by a quenching swim when I returned to the hotel. Tess explored the phenomenon that is breakfast television and then headed out for a walk. Tristan and Liz began their day with some bouldering and Jon spent a few hours catching up on some mixing work.
The afternoon brought a new activity with Tess, Tristan and I setting off in the tank to visit one of Phoenix’s more popular tourist attractions, set just fifteen minutes east of downtown in Papago Park. The Desert Botanical Garden welcomed us with an impressive array of cacti around the carpark and it only got better as we entered and began exploring the vast array of trails that guide you through this magnificent collection of desert plants. Hummingbirds darted around the gardens feasting on the abundant flowers while Round-Tailed Ground Squirrels scurried between bushes, sometimes being kind enough to stop so we could photograph them.
One of the main attractions was the butterfly pavilion, a tall enclosure with mesh walls that contained around 1500 butterflies of species native to the Southwest. As soon as you stopped moving and allowed your eyes to shift focus they were on every surface, adorning the leaves of every plant, and fluttering about chasing each other in what looked like fun and innocent game but realistically was probably an aggressive male behaviour. You had to be careful with every step you took not to tread on one of these little creatures because they often chose the footpath as a resting place, and even though they had 1400 spare ones it would be an embarrassing misstep.
As beautiful and serene as this desert garden was, the real highlight of the afternoon was finding an old vending machine that was still doling out ¢75 cans of coke: a rare and refreshing treat in this age of inflation.
We arrived at the venue later in the afternoon and began our usual pre-show process: sitting in the green room and trying all the different snacks, finding the catering, drinking a La Croix, and then setting our instruments up in preparation for soundcheck. We had our hour out on stage to make ourselves sound good and then we retired to the catering room to grab an early dinner.
The venue was called Arizona Financial Theatre, another large, poorly named indoor multi-use space with seating banks that seem to ascend almost vertically up towards the enormously high ceiling, leaving the inhabitants of the top mezzanine in a precarious-looking position. This room can hold 5000 people and this time when we went out to play it didn’t feel very full, possibly due to the early Tuesday night start time of 7pm. It’s difficult to tell sometimes, how you are received by a crowd, especially when you are wearing in-ear monitors and you can’t hear them so we just played our thirty minutes with gusto and then did a quick and professional job of clearing the stage.
Deathcab for Cutie and The Postal Service didn’t have any such problems. The room was packed by the time they went out and the Phoenix crowd were very appreciative. As usual we went out and watched the whole show and enjoyed every moment of it.
