Up early today while Marlene slept and I got some work in. Checked out of the Wyndham Phoenix and off on adventures. Our first stop of the day was at the McFarlane Toys store in Tempe.
Quite an eventful trip. I saw Todd McFarlane in person for a few seconds and chatted with Al Simmons for a bit too. Todd McFarlane is known for his line of highly detailed toys (including the latest halo 3 figures) as a comic book artist (he created Spawn, and had a major run as artist on Spiderman) and a collector of baseball memorabilia. Al Simmons was a character in the Spawn series and I got to meet the namesake Well, at the store itself, I was helped the assistant store manager take stuff down off the walls as they were prepping to move out of that location and shift everything to the Glendale location (see the first Phoenix post). That was quite an experience and in between all of it, got some more great deals as well as purchasing a plaque they had on the wall for the Spawn cartoon series. It was truly unique.
From there we headed into downtown Tempe, a college town, and had lunch at Ra Sushi (the same chain I ate at in Chicago a few weeks ago). A great filling lunch. Tempe was nice and even in the 110 degree weather, which oddly, was bearable due to no humidity, and we wandered around a bit. I found an antique store that was going out of business and bought some really old items that I'll talk about at the end of this trip.
Next up, back in the car (a yellow PT Cruiser for this trip) and off to Mesa. Which wasn't much. So we left there and stopped at a casino along the way towards Scottsdale where we broke even on playing slots. From there, Scottsdale and the Fairmont Resort, where even our low level room is very large. A really nice place that we'll explore more over the next few days.
Dinner was in Scottsdale where we had some Thai food that was good as well. And a stop at Wal-Mart to buy a first aid kit. Why? It seems a cactus attacked Marlene and we had to get a bunch of needles that were still hiding in her hand. Kids, when you see a cactus, stay as far away as you can. Trust me on this.
