August 19, 2016

August 19, 2016

I guess I did a good job working on our front yard beautification project, because I was released on good behavior for a short vacation.  We are heading north, way north, to find some much cooler weather and a break from Arizona’s unrelenting heat.  Since my furlough is limited, driving is out of the question; we are flying.  We leave tomorrow bright and early out of Phoenix, so we take advantage of an airport hotel’s Park and Fly program and drive up late this afternoon.

Since I am not one to go anywhere without a side trip, I do a quick scan of the Internet before leaving and find a curiosity that piques my interest.  Two hours later we pull into downtown Phoenix and find Wesley Bolen Memorial Plaza across from the state capitol. This little city park has a memorial to the sinking of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.  It is well done containing one of the two original anchors, the Signal Mast, and a recently added enormous gun barrel.  There is also an artsy display of all the names of sailors who perished during the attack.

Our planned 10-minute stop turned into an hour when we looked around and found dozens of other memorials, seemingly to every cause imaginable.  There are the standard ones to the wars we fought, but also some more unusual ones, like Armenian Genocide, the Navajo “code talkers” of WWII, Confederate soldiers, Pioneer women, Spanish missionary Fr. Kino, and not so surprisingly for conservative Arizona, a monument honoring the Bill of Rights.