Best Place To Be Entertained 2002 | Peoria Sports Complex | Megalopolitan Life | Phoenix
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Best Place To Be Entertained

Peoria Sports Complex

Not every Valley municipal project is a boondoggle.

In its eight years in existence, the sprawling Peoria Sports Complex has become the northwest Valley's magnet for an incredible array of events. One weekend, you can see the Goo Goo Dolls, the next you can watch Japan's best professional baseball players duking it out on the Complex's numerous state-of-the-art baseball diamonds. Because of all the activity, the Complex, in the last three years, has become a draw for all sorts of hotels and restaurants.

You can watch Little Leaguers bashing it out most any weekend. Old guys can attend fantasy camps in which they get to play with their major league heroes. The facility even hosts an Easter egg hunt, besides numerous other community festivals. And it's home-team ground for the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres for Cactus League play.

More so than anywhere in the Valley, you can show up at the Peoria Sports Complex on any weekend and expect to be entertained.

Best San Diego Substitute

Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Resort

It feels like everyone is cutting their vacation budget. If the kids are bummed because you aren't going to San Diego to escape the heat of summer, take heart. Try the Sonoran Splash plan at the très luxe Scottsdale Princess. The promotion features Dive-In Movies on a 12-foot-by-16-foot screen mounted at the pool, which is filled with inner tubes for wet viewing. Although the movie lineup is aimed at kids of all ages (e.g., Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Shrek, Beethoven's 4th), cocktails are available for adults floating on inner tubes.

Scheduled from June 22 through September 9, 2003, the Sonoran Splash includes lots of extras for parents, such as yoga classes and tennis clinics, and even free breakfasts for kids under 12. And no one of any age should miss the two water slides. At 186 feet and 199 feet, respectively, they are the largest of any resort in the state. Room rates begin at $129, with kids staying free in the parents' accommodation.

Best Spot For An Impromptu Wet Tee Shirt Contest

Vista del Camino Park's sprinkler playground

For those of us forbidden to run through the sprinkler when we were children (for fear that -- heaven help us -- we'd smush up the lawn), this small playground on Scottsdale's greenbelt, just northwest of the Hayden-Roosevelt intersection, is the stuff of wet dreams.

Sundry streams shoot from the trunk of a plastic palm tree and from a fish tail sticking straight up into the sky. Kids small and tall can jump through two squirting hoops, dodge half a dozen geysers rising from the concrete and get face-to-face with a bulbous pirate's head, whose nostril nozzles are more than a little creepy.

One consideration: Before you turn your Sunday stroll into a Warrant video remake, please, think of the children. The park's only open during daylight hours, after all.

Best Ivy League Wanna-Be

City of Tempe Parks and Recreation

Sculling calls to mind images of dear old Oxford across the pond, or even rowing upon the Charles River in Boston. Now you can join the sport of English gentry and New England Brahmins right here in the desert. Don't let the artificial lake distract you.

The City of Tempe offers classes in team rowing or individual sculling (providing you've mastered the basics). All levels, from master to novice, are taught on Town Lake under the historic Mill Avenue bridge.

Best Place To Relive Your Brooklyn Childhood

Beyond Bagels

Beyond Bagels has all the stuff you expect to find these days at a deli that claims New York roots: an American flag prominently displayed; a giant photo of the now eerie-seeming Old New York skyline; cartoons by the cash register about kicking bin Laden's ass. And bags of Wise potato chips. But where this place really turns the corner from New York sentimentality into full-on nostalgia is in the check-out line. That's where you'll be enticed by a host of candies and toys -- and not just the stuff you're used to seeing in supermarkets; these are the candies and toys that anyone who grew up back East would recognize, but would probably be amazed to find.

Feast your eyes on the packet of Candy Buttons. Remember those? Small, bright-colored dots of sugar stuck on sheets of paper? How about Pixy Stix? Still as potent as ever. And believe it or not, they even have bubblegum cigars, in all three colors: yellow, pink and green. (Richard, the proprietor, admits to having entertained the idea of also offering bubblegum cigarettes -- the kind you used to blow through to generate puffs of sugar "smoke" -- but he rightly feared that they'd be frowned upon. Most of these vintage goodies, he adds, are available only over the Internet.)

And just to jolt your humid childhood memories into overdrive, there are also the toys. Favorites include the plastic army-man Parachute Jumpers and Stick Ball balls and bats. You'se guys up for a game in the sandlot?

Best CD Release Tie-In Event

Haggis Listening Party
June 20
British Open Pub

In any local music scene, a band announcing a new album with a CD release party is like somebody celebrating a bowel movement. Everybody does it, some several times a week. However, when the band known as Haggis wanted to draw attention to its latest CD, Karma Suits Ya, it did so with a stylish sense of the occasional that made the CD release parties thrown by established indie labels seem like empty gestures.

Not only did Haggis play two back-to-back CD release party blasts at Hollywood Alley, the Tartan Four held a not-so-secret listening party at a local British pub. Haggis fans were spared bagpipe music this time around and were treated to goodie bags, raffled tee shirts, free drinks and food provided by the British Open Pub and Guinness. It was a Bacchanalian blast that made you swear it was 1975 and the Faces were launching a tour.

The Haggis name was reinforced at the buffet table; what people thought were Swedish meatballs was actually the national dish of Scotland. Yup, boiled sheep's intestines, although the delicacy has been known to include sheep's lung, stomach, heart and liver in casings, depending on their availability in the U.S. and how many transplanted Scots are in line ahead of you, waiting for baa-baa's innards. The move was sheer genius. Years from now, the band's fans will remember which Karma Suits Ya song was playing the first time they ate haggis.

Best Place To Feed The Need For Speed

Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving

Living under the watchful eye of the Valley's radar-patrolled freeways and red-light cameras has our inner speed demons so pent up that we could get a Hyundai-manufactured golf cart with two flat tires to exceed 50 mph. Seems it's high time we took a day off from traffic school to spend a day at Bobby B.'s school adjacent to Firebird International Raceway.

This so-called "school" features a 1.6-mile road course, an eight-acre paddock and more than 200 race-prepared vehicles. Classes range from the -- yawn! -- necessary and practical (i.e., Teenage Defensive Driving) to the -- gulp! -- downright intimidating. Unless you're James Bond or David Letterman, we imagine that the four-day, $4,000 "Executive Protection/Anti-Kidnapping" course of "intense driver training for high-risk individuals" is, well, not meant for you.

Fortunately, even mild-mannered AAA members can get fast and furious. If you can't swing $4,850 for the three-day Advanced Road Racing course, cough up 350 bucks (equivalent to about 10 parking tickets) and the boys'll let you lap Phoenix International Raceway's one-mile oval in an F-1 Style Formula Ford for 150 precious minutes.

Best Place To Feel Home On The Range

OK Corral

Ever wanted to say something like, "Get along, little dogies," or "Howdy, partner," and have it be somewhat appropriate? We suggest you try a horseback trail ride with the folks from OK Corral, the oldest pack station in the Superstition Mountains. Summer rides are up through Payson and the Mogollon Rim, and regular-season rides take you all over the Superstitions, including an all-inclusive trek to the Lost Dutchman mine. The rates are very reasonable, and you can take a couple of hours, a day trip, or even an extended trip with camping and a steak fry. A trail ride through the mountains is part of the Arizona experience, and the OK Corral is the most bang for your buck. And don't worry if you aren't easy in the saddle; they have horses for all types of people, whether they're experts or have never ridden any horse that wasn't attached to a pole in front of Kmart.

Best Place To Break Up With Your Lover

Carlsbad Tavern

We're not vindictive, really. We wish the best for that yellow-bellied, sneaky, lying hunk of flesh we've been dating. We certainly don't want to hurt anyone's feelings with a breakup.

So we'll let Carlsbad do the talking. We'll bring our loser, er, lover in for dinner. A romantic evening out, we'll say. Don't bother with a menu, we know exactly what you need, we'll insist. And then we'll order the chile cheeseburger for them. We won't bother to mention that this isn't just any Anaheim chile burger, but one fashioned with Carlsbad's New Mexican artillery, the incendiary habanero chile.

It comes with fries, salad and a free glass of milk (though if we're feeling really wicked we'll tell the server to hold the beverage).

As Carlsbad's menu warns, the burger may cause temporary blindness or loss of hearing. Maybe our beloved will lose the ability to speak, too. Gee, that would just be too bad.

Best Place To Eat With The Animals

Farrelli's Cinema Supper Club

So we're not kid people. So shoot us. Or better yet, shoot the kids. No, really, we think kids are okay; we just don't understand how people can have them and hope to have any chance of a normal life afterward.

Farrelli's feels our pain. And so, in a stroke of genius, this feeding/film house offers family festivals, offering dinner and a movie for parents with small kids, even babies. Dailey movies at 5 and 6 p.m. cater to the wee folk, when Mom and Dad can cart in the kid, watch a flick and feed on baked Brie a l'orange, spinach salad with feta and pine nuts, and center cut top sirloin. Kiddies keep happy snacking on pizza, chicken or spaghetti, while watching classic yarns like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

It's full table service as the movie rolls, and there's even an isolation room to handle the infants acting infantile (or parents who've simply had enough). At all other movie showtimes, it's no diapers allowed, just as the world should be.

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