When Wilzie and I are scouting hotels on Expedia before booking a trip, one of the things that is important to us is location.  In addition to free breakfast, free happy hour drinks, and cockatoos in the lobby – the location of the hotel is the most important thing.

In New York we like to stay near Times Square – its busy and bustling and is in reasonable walking or subway distance from everything.

In San Francisco we like to stay near the Ferry Building – it meets all of our needs for food, both healthy and oh-so not, and is also a good walking distance to just about anything we want to go to.

In Vancouver we like to stay downtown, easily walkable to Gastown, Yaletown and Stanley Park.

Are you sensing a pattern?

While researching Arizona, we noticed that there isn’t one specific area that is central to many things.  Phoenix (and area) is a driving city – everything is very spread out and anything worth seeing is miles away from the next thing.  We focused on Scottsdale for our hotel – there are a ton of restaurants around (always important), the Fashion Square (a big, fancy mall) is a big draw and we kept reading about the Scottsdale Waterfront.  I was confused – the last I checked, Arizona is in the desert, a landlocked state; what is this waterfront of which they speak?

We decided to stay in a hotel close to this reputed waterfront.  It should be awesome, Arizona is hot, so it would be nice to be able to step right outside our hotel and go for a dip in the water.  Might there be a beach?  With umbrellas set up, maybe?  That would be sweet.

On our first night here we went for a walk to check out the famous Scottsdale Waterfront.  All we found was an aquaduct that ran through the city.

An aquaduct.

No swimming, no beach, no umbrellas.  Just an aquaduct.  Granted, it is spruced up for about a block with flowers and fancy condos and restaurants on either side – but after that single block, it goes back to being an ugly cement aquaduct.

Did I mention that our hotel has free drinks every night?  That is awesome.