Weather: High 80's, blue sky.
We had read about a festival that was going on this weekend in Cave Creek a little town just north of Phoenix about 15 miles and decided to drive up and see what it was about. The activities sounded interesting and included an Art Fest and a lot of arts and crafts. Of some interest on Saturday morning was a horse back cowboy and cowgirl (cowperson?) poker run. Last year they had a reported 200 riders and this year they expected 250. The only problem was it started at 7:30 AM and ended around 11 AM. By the time we got up to Cave Creek it was around noon and we were too late to see the horseback activities. I would guess that a lot of well dressed cowpersons participated.
In general Cave Creek has maintained an old west town motif and uses that as a draw for visitors. They have a first saturday of the month arts and crafts flea market that is popular. The general area is not built up much yet but there are a number of large adobe homes sprouting up around and on the mountains there.
First order of business for us was lunch and the choice was large for such a small town. Probably a lot people head up there for lunch and dinners from Phoenix as a get-a-way kind of place. BBQ seems to be a theme there and we opted to stop at "The Horny Toad" for lunch. They have a pretty good menu and although BBQ is not their specialty I decided to have their BBQ pork sandwich which turned out to be a good choice. You might ask how they picked the name Horny Toad. The back of the menu explained that. The short version that for some reason they attribute to Easterners thinking is that it's a frog anxiouly awaiting an answer to a mating call. The more to truth version is that it's a type of insect-eating lizard of the family lguanidae whose body resembles that of a toad or frog with a rough body, short tail and it's head furnished with horny spikes. The actual restaurant name came from a lengthy story about a prospector in the area many years ago. If you want to hear or read that storyt you will have to ask to borrow the menu that we kept.
Below are Joan and I as we were leaving The Horny Toad.
The nice dune buggy below with the chromed V8 was in the Horny Toad parking lot. Pretty cool and the message on the back probably is a result of many people asking how much it cost.
After looking through a lot of gift shops and buying the required T-shirt we had a great root beer float at "Big Al's Drive-in". On a warm afternoon they were wonderful and consisted of two large scoops of vanilla ice cream and they gave us the can of A&W Root Beer to pour over it . The place would fit nicely on Rt. 66 somewheres. It was a converted old time gas station with the overhead awning that projected out part way to the street where the pumps used to sit. Now there are tables under it and since the inside of the building was small there were only 6 or 8 tables in there.
It was fun to sit there and adsorb some of the atmosphere.
I will fill you in on the return trip on tomorrow's blog entry.
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