Thursday, April 8, 2010

More Exploring

If you’ve spent time in Phoenix, you know that it’s big and spread out.  To get anywhere, you travel for miles on highways or major roads to get anywhere.   If you’ve not yet visited this jewel of the Southwest, get ready to do a lot of driving to reach your destination around town.  Luckily, the highways and major streets are fairly easy to navigate (except at rush hour of course!) and traveling them is not too bad.  Our destination today was first, to take a look at McDowell Mountain Regional Park, especially the campground, and second, to have lunch at Greasewood Flat, a hamburger place that came very highly recommended by Janna and Mike.

We got started a little before 10, heading out of our park and up the street to the 101 East loop for about 25 miles to the exit at Shea Road, another 10 miles across that section of town to the turn-off to the road leading up to McDowell Mountain Park.  After driving several more miles through some very exclusive neighborhoods, we arrived at the entrance to the park.  Not far from the entrance, we stopped to admire the view back towards Four Peaks:

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We continued on to the campground area after a brief stop at the visitor’s center.

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The campground features two loops with water and electric sites and a dump station.  It has an entirely different feel than Lake Pleasant, but both are good possibilities for us in the future.  We’ve driven through Usery Mountain park on a previous visit, but still want to check out that campground before we leave this time.  There’s a good possibility we could be doing some park hopping in our future travels to this area.

The flowers are still glorious in all their color:

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After exploring the park, it was time to find our way to Greasewood Flat, incongruously located in North Scottsdale, nestled among million-dollar (or more) homes.  The location of this bar and restaurant is an old stage stop along the way from Phoenix to Ft. McDowell.  Their main attraction is their huge, juicy burgers, which were very, very good!

 

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After lunch we made our way back home and relaxed a little while before going over to the pool for a swim.  It’s been a great day!

4 comments:

squawmama said...

Phoenix is HUGE and the flowers were not in bloom when I was there... They are gorgeous! Great photos but where's the BEEF?
Have fun & travel safe
Donna

Roadrunner Chronicles said...

Beautiful pictures! The desert is really blooming out! We stayed in Tucson for a month and made it to the Scottsdale area, but never to Fort McDowell. Thanks for taking us along...

Janna and Mike said...

Did you see the fountain in Fountain Hills? We loved McDowell Mountain Park--loads of hiking.
Glad you got to Greasewood Flat--isn't it a quirky place??

KarenInTheWoods said...

Gosh those flowers are sooo pretty! Sure wish the desert looked that way all the time. Thanks for the campground reviews too.

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