Monday, January 20, 2014, Arizona Science Center, Hole-in-the-Rock, Organ Stop Pizza, Phoenix, AZ

We headed back to Phoenix, AZ, with a full day's agenda. First stop, the Arizona Science Center (free on the ASTC list). It was another museum designed for school kids, but it was done very well and at times you didn't even notice all of the noise. 

I talked with Stuart, a Ham radio operator, who volunteers at the museum. His transceiver was connected through a serial port to a computer so he could display all of the radio traffic in the frequency band he was monitoring. Only one little boy came by as we talked. He sat down and started banging on the keyboard until Stuart started talking to him. The boy immediately lost interest and left.

I think the docent very much appreciated someone showing an interest.

Yes, that's David.  What a good sport!

Next, we hiked up "Hole-in-the-Rock." It was a very busy park next to the Phoenix Zoo. The climb was extremely easy and took less than five minutes to reach the hole.

The view was very nice even if we were surrounded by fifty other folks enjoying the same experience.

We had been thinking about a new mattress for the coach for a while. Joani thought we should consider a latex mattress. We found this little family owned and operated store in Phoenix where we were able to "sample" a number of models and ask a lot of questions. They have a number of good features, but ultimately, were just too expensive. At least we got that out of our system for a while.

We finished our day with a visit to Organ Stop Pizza. Reviews indicated it would be a worthwhile stop and they were not wrong. Our pizza was pretty good, but the show was the real fun. There were instruments all over the huge dining hall and everything was controlled from the keyboard.

The organ has nearly 6,000 pipes and it was quite a sight watching Charlie Balogh at the keyboard. Looking at the specifications for the Mighty Wurlitzer, we found it had 4 keyboards (276 keys) and 798 Stops and Controls, a grand piano, a rinky tink piano, a full set of percussion instruments, a glockenspiel and many, many more instruments. We even heard the Oogah horn and the Tweety bird in one number. He even did one of my favorites - Dave Brubeck's "Take Five."

I snapped this picture and then switched to video when the organ rose out of the floor. I have no idea how to capture a frame from a video (without a fancy program). Trust me, it was quite a show.

I figured out how to embed a video (thank you, Katie), but when I looked on youtube there were videos much better than mine.