December 16th - Somerton Tamale Festival

Every year, in the small town of Somerton, they hold the big Tamale Festival.  When we found out about it, we had to go.  Laurie and I drove down with her friend Amy, and we were to meet Norma and her husband, Dale.  Somerton is not a large town just a few miles south of Yuma.  The biggest thing in the town is a campus of the University of Arizona.  We drove around and found where the festival was and then searched for a decent place to park.

That done, we entered one end of the part of town that was closed off for the festival.  The first thing we came across, was a children's dance class where the dancers were of varying ages and doing traditional Mexican dances if full historic costumes.  It was a fun show to watch a bit.

Strolling down the walk, What we saw, was a lot of booths side by side, each one belonging to a different tamale kitchen.  The people in them were pulling tamales out of warmers, and serving up to the customers.  There was a couple of booths that gave information and directions.  They took your money for a packet of coupons.  Every tamale being sold cost two tickets and you could buy any number of tickets with a discount for a packet of 10 or twenty.  This kept the sellers from having to deal with money.

There were more varieties of tamale than I could imagine.  Veggie, pork, beef, lamb, chicken, seafood, and then, pineapple, strawberry and many others.  There is a basic contest between the vendors for the best tamales.  A cheat sheet told you which vendors had what to offer, and the nice people at the front booth told us who were the winners from the previous year.

I'm not a big tamale person.  I don't care for the corn meal casing.  That said, I had quite a few different tamales, and though it wasn't the best food adventure ever, I did enjoy them all.

We met our other friends and walked around and saw what there was to see.  On the opposite end from where we came in, they had a stage with a local band playing some rocking country music.

On our way out, we watched the kids dancing again and then started the long drive home.  I would love to do this sort of thing again.

Somerton, Arizona

Dancers

The booths

"The Gold Dragon" Really? Chinese and Mexican food?

US

March 31st - 3:10 to Yuma

On our last trip to Los Algodones, we met a couple standing in the long exit line who were from Yuma.  Yuma is less than 5 miles from there.  In our conversations, we talked about craft beers.  They told us there are a lot of craft beer breweries in Yuma. Since it was still early in the day, we decided to go ahead and drive the couple extra miles and see for ourselves. 

There is only a single brewer in Yuma.  One of the major tourist attractions in Yuma is the old federal prison.  We did not go there as this was a spur of the moment trip, but instead, we went to the downtown area tp visit Prison Hill Brewing there.

When we got to the area, I, of course, checked to see if there was a geocache nearby. We found one and logged it.  Right there on main street. The downtown area, as is the case in many places these days, is being revitalized.  Pretty nice, but it's still a desert town.  We picked up the cache, went to the brew pub, and then shopped in the antique stores for silhouettes for her mom. Then we drove home

Of course, everything at Prison Hill was prison themed.  They had a selection of their beers as well as a selection from many of the San Diego brewers.  It was okay, and the food was pretty good.

Cool old stuff

More cool

Geocaching at the antiques store

Downtown, town center

Prison Hill Brewing

The board of offerings

Nice marble top

The food

The menu

Tanks for coming