Wintering in Arizona
Travel January 18th, 2010If you are looking to stay in luxurious surroundings, you’ll find it scattered throughout the Valley of the Sun, from Scottsdale to Phoenix to Mesa to Tempe, hotels which beg you to stay in them, even if you’re local to Arizona. As a former resident of these desert cities, I can attest to the fact that you’ll be able to visit in style resort and spa hotels at any point in the year; however, locals will often wait to the summer months to take advantage, because in the off-season you’ll find great deals. Tourist season for Phoenix are the winter months (right now, in fact), where you’ll find an extremely comfortable desert world, the temperature usually settling in around the 70s and even 80s; even as I write these words, Phoenix is hovering in the high sixties and early seventies, in the middle of January. It’s no wonder that so many people visit now. Of course, the summer months are a different story, where the temperature is capable of rising to 117 degrees or higher. For that reason alone, some people make a weekend of it, renting a luxurious hotel room and spending their time in air conditioned comfort.
Like most people, though, if you’re from out of town, you’ve arrived in winter to escape colder climates elsewhere (Phoenix is a great place from which to call relatives and friends and ask how cold it is in the Mid or Northwest). While temperatures plunge below zero in other realms, Phoenix seems to exist outside the real world. In the summer months, people are pretty much forced to live in their homes, quickly moving to the air-conditioned cars, and then to their air-conditioned jobs and coffee shops and malls, and so on. Not a lot happens outdoors until much later in the evening; and even then, the nights can remain in 90 degree temperatures.
In the winter months, however, there’s a great deal more for a visitor to do. In the winter, it’s a pleasure to take a trip to one of the many golf courses or a visit to the Heard Museum, specializing in Native Peoples, or to the Phoenix Zoo in Papago Park, or even a stroll through the campus at Arizona State University in Tempe. No matter what part of town you find your hotel in, you’ll find a great escape from the rest of the nation’s winter.
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