Family Comes to Visit

Our son Eric, wife Liz and our grandchildren from Colorado, Kylie and John, came to Arizona last weekend. They stayed in Scottsdale in a condo owned by Liz's sister. Friday we joined them for dinner--a bucket of chicken from KFC.

Saturday we met them at the Musical Instrument Museum. A visit there is always an opportunity to learn something new.

The variety of zithers--stringed instruments, aka guitars--is amazing.

I had never heard of thumb pianos before.  Obviously, they aren't unique.

All of these are drums, zithers and rattles from South Africa.

Such a variety of horns and other wind instruments.

Alice Cooper was never an entertainer I listened to.  But he certainly had interesting clothes.

          

There were displays on how instruments are made.  Here you can see the parts of a grand piano case.

This is a primitive bagpipe.

 

Many instruments were handmade.  Here you can see a banjo and bass violin.

We don't go out to eat often, so we first experienced touchless menus when we went to lunch at Diego Pops, a taco restaurant in Phoenix.  I guess these menus--which we pulled up on our phones--is the way to avoid touching menus others have handled--it's a Covid thing, I guess.  We did have a good time at lunch.

Several years ago, Eric had flown down to visit us and we went to the Botanical Gardens.  He wanted to go there again, so we met them there on Sunday.

In addition to the desert plants, the gardens always have major art displays.  The last time we were there, we saw numerous glass sculptures by Chihuly. This time it was Wild Rising by Cracking Art.  It included numerous meercats and at least one giant snail.

But what we were really interested in were the cactus and other desert plants.

These small cactus plants remind me of green eggs being broken open by the baby bird inside.

This is certainly an unusual tree.

I was reminded of stacked stones when I looked at this cactus.

Eric, Kylie and John enjoyed walking the labyrinth.

We all enjoyed the shade in this ramada.

And there were even more sculptures--including some large birds and unusual stacks of small birds.

Music and Lunch

Sometimes it is difficult to blog because we aren't doing anything different or interesting. I can only write about walking 10,000 steps a day so many different ways. Sometimes it is difficult to blog because we are so busy I don't have time to write at the end of the day. That has been the problem in the past few days. John's sister Cindy flew in Wednesday last week and his sister Kendal and husband John flew in Friday. We were gone almost non-stop for five days. We had such a good time, but I was too busy and tired to blog. Now I am a week behind here and have to try and remember the details of what we did. Thank heavens for the pictures we took.

The Musical Instrument Museum was our destination Friday morning. We have been there once before and you can read about it here. The museum is huge and we didn't have the time or energy to explore all the galleries on that visit. Two areas we missed were the American and Arizona exhibits. This time we spent a lot of time there, as well as the European section.

We saw lots of guitars and other stringed instruments.

This is a keyed guitar.

Each museum visitor is given headphones. You stand in front of a screen and hear the music being performed--Bluetooth I imagine.

We saw all kinds of bagpipes.

We had a great lunch in the Allegro Café.  Notice we all had sweet potato fries with our sandwich.  You can see part of the beautiful grounds through the windows.

In the Arizona section we learned that there is a school of luthiery in the state. Luthiery is making wooden stringed instruments.

I wasn't aware of the fact Alice Cooper got his start in Arizona.

One section looked at the Blues and the fact that many early Blues artists used home-made instruments.  Here we see a jug, an ice bucket guitar and a cigar box guitar.