Phoenix Quilt Show/ Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza

Enough of the motorcycle blogs.....  today was Loyce's day to go to one of her favorite quilt shows....  Its at the Arizona Fair Grounds in downtown Phoenix...

We left the house about 9 AM and drove directly to the fair grounds, where we found the traffic jam of grandiose proportions....  A massive line that began almost the moment we were off of I 10 on 19th street...

Seems they were all going in the front gate...  I waited for a while in line, but decided that they weren't going to the back gate which is usually open too...  Once out of line we drove right to the other gate that had almost no one lined up...

Today there was a dog show in some of the buildings as well as the quilt show...  I just dropped Loyce at the front gate to the industry building and quietly left the property....

So where to go while waiting...?  How about down to the Capitol Building and Grounds...?

The building is nestled into the center of a parcel of ground that is surrounded by legislature buildings and a large office building to the West...  There were about a million grade school children out front waiting to get in...   Not too patiently either.....  This is as close as I got.

To the East is the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza  which contains numerous and various memorials commemorating various events in history...  Wesley Bolin is a former Governor of Arizona..

We all remember the Battleship Arizona and its demise from Japanese bombs on December 7, 1941..   The memorial on the grounds includes the anchor and the many plaques on its base includes the names of all of the shipmates that perished that day.

And mounted in the center of the plaza is the signal mast from the ship...

For those of us in the Navy this is the yardarm...  But I could find no place on any of the plaques that referred to it as such..  The yard is the cross piece where the top of the signal flag lines are attached,  the ends of the yard are referred to as arms...  Anyway this is a small surviving piece of the otherwise sunken ship...

I have been on the memorial in Pearl Harbor so this means a lot to me...

As you walk around this two block long Memorial Mall there are numerous monuments...

 This is the Peace Officers Monument to fallen officers....

I looked at this one for quite a while until I determined that this was a Navajo code talker on his radio during WWII..

Purple Heart..

Bushmasters Arizona Army National Guard

Monuments in no particular order, this plaque of the ten commandments has been controversial over the years because of the separation of church and state doctrines....  The law suits have failed so far and it is still in the circle with the other monuments... But not without the American Civil Liberties Union's protest...

Desert Storm

To honor the current fallen soldiers from the Desert conflicts, this memorial has names of Arizona's fallen..  Some of the names are so recently engraved that the dust of the stone is still on the ground...

This is the Korean Memorial...

I resisted the urge to go ring this bell....  But I'm not sure there is a clapper inside of it as Asian bells are usually struck with an external hammer...

I didn't find the Vietnam Memorial and I was out of time as it was time to go get Loyce..  This is robbed from another source on the web...



Once back at the quilt show, there must have been 10,000 vehicles parked in almost all of the available parking, so all I could do was mill around up and down the aisles until she called on the phone that she was done...

We had a good day at our respective endeavors...

Retired Rod