I was in grad school that year. It was brutally hot and I grew up in the Sacramento valley. I forget but I think there was about 100 days straight where the low was 90 degrees.
Full of right wing rednecks, so the OP’s husband might like it.
Plane landed at around 11 pm. Sweltering hot. Drove the next day to Flagstaff, hailed on the way.
With an open bottle? Not legally, though some places may not enforce it much.
That’s odd. Liquor can be sold on Sundays here between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. the following morning. You must have tried to buy your beer too early in the day.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who thought most of at least the Phoenix metro area looks like it was designed with heavy use of copy & paste. I don’t understand why people want to live there but, hey, it takes all kinds. Up towards Flagstaff, though, that’s more my vibe.
He’s not a “right wing redneck.” He’s an old-style conservative, but he’s also pretty much a live and let live kind of guy. He just would prefer to live somewhere where the majority of people don’t think anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders is a Nazi. I can sympathize.
I’m actually more of a moderate, with very liberal views about things like feminist and LGBT issues. I think we’d both be happy in a moderate area where people are willing to discuss their differences, not demonize each other.
Ugh, not liking the comments about the heat. I hate heat. We run the AC all summer here. I’d hope if the house is paid off we could afford to keep the place in the mid 70s, at least. No way could I handle 85 inside all the time. 
Don’t mind heat outside, but I have to be able to get away from it.
Phoenix is a city that should not exist. To quote King of the Hill, it’s a monument to man’s hubris. Among other things, they’re going to outstrip their water supply. At least Albuquerque has been serious about water conservation for almost as long as I can remember and actively manages the aquifer draw-down with surface water rights.
Flagstaff’s a nice town, if snowy. Tucson is much better than Phoenix.
Heh. I remember watching the world weather on BBC, which prides itself on correct pronunciations, and when they were covering the US, the English forecaster mentionnd “Tuck-son.”
The rest of Arizona agrees.
You run the AC in the 5 hottest months. Those months are flanked by a month or maybe two that require NO cooling or heating. In the winter, you will want to run some heat.
My annual electric bill runs about $1300, for a three bedroom 1800-ft home.
Don’t sweat it.
But it’s a dry heat. 
Yeah, most people most of the time eat out at chains; isn’t that true almost anywhere? There are plenty of good independent restaurants. Scottsdale is thick with them and there some in downtown Phoenix as well as Tempe; being a college town, the latter tends toward pub grub. In Mesa the choices are more limited, either chain or Mexican, but the Mexican are excellent.
Phoenix New Times’ annual Best of Phoenix has over a hundred restaurant categories – albeit some of them narrowly focused (Best elote?) – without a chain among them. In the print version they have the results of a readers’ poll for about a third of the more common categories and a chain will sneak in there once in a while.
Paint with a broad brush much? At least we (finally) got rid of the sheriff.
At least we got 21. And they do have these off craps and roulette machines where you can kind of get the camaraderie around a table, but yeah, it ain’t the same.
That was a bureaucratic thing, not physical. Before you take off in a heavy you get out a chart that says, with this gross weight and this altitude and this temperature you need X feet of runway to get off of the ground. The problem was the FAA charts topped off at 120-degrees; no proof, no takeoff. The charts have since been extended to 130-degrees so (fingers crossed) it shouldn’t happen again.
Having said that, yeah, 117 is brutal. If that high a temperature is predicted, we spend the day somewhere higher if possible.
If you want a liberal vibe (and a bit cooler) look into Tucson. If you want a liberal vibe (and a lot cooler) look into Flagstaff. Prescott can also be nice but is not so liberal. Any of the three, and even Phoenix, will delight you about the housing prices.
Don’t expect jack for public transportation. Sure, there’s the much triumphed light rail system, but it’s a joke. And even though it runs on the roads, stopping at lights etc., and a waste of money, they plan expanding it, tearing up roads for years at a time. If you buy, ask about the future light rail routes.
That’s only correct if they also routinely pronounce the capital of France as Pair-ee. In Spanish its tuke SONE. In English, it’s Toosahn.
Phoenix is the sixth largest city jn the country. There’s more than chain restaurants, Circle K and trumpistas. We have culture and everything else, whether you elite coasters think so or not.
But if you all stay away, that works for me. I hate snowbirds and old fart retirees clogging the aisles in the stores and driving 20 under the speed limit with their blinker on (it’s not just a cliche) and voting against school funding because “their kids are all grown”.
T-shirt for sale here: When I retire I’m gonna spend my summers up in Canada driving really slow.
Yes and no. We did know, at the time, that the problem was the charts cutting off at 120 deg. But why were the charts drawn that way in the first place? That was a technical decision made, not a bureaucratic one. IOW, you’re living in a place where it gets hotter than what some pretty educated folks thought was possible for a major city with an airport that supports jets.
Then you’ll hate everything about Phoenix. The only question commonly on their lips is whether Arpaio is about right or not nearly extreme enough. IOW in their eyes, he’s pretty much a centrist.
I lived there for a year in the 1980s. My Mom lived there for a couple decades after that. Beastly hot, kinda humid, and full of an angry ignorant impatience. There are large road signs at many major intersections that say “red means stop”. Because a decent fraction of the public has decided that obeying lights is an imposition on their freedom or convenience or something.
Other areas of Arizona are not so piggish. But they’re all at least as far right as Berkeley is far left. Or at least this was true as recently as 5 years ago.
We locals like to call it “Too Stoned.” 
Thirty six posts about Arizona and no one has mentioned scorpions?
I know you want opinions from people who have lived/live in Arizona but my take on Arizona, from up here in Ohio, is: scorpions.
Meh, everyone has something.
Other parts of the country have earthquakes, tornadoes, mosquitoes the size of drones, rats the size of cats, cockroaches, poisonous snakes (yes, we have them, too), and many others.
But yes, scorpions are bad here. A sting won’t kill you. It just hurts so much you wish you were dead. :eek:
My family loves it here, but it really comes down to how well you tolerate the heat. A funny observation, most people who grew up here can wait to head to cooler climates. As someone who wanted to escape a life time of cold, they are welcome to it. There are 5 months of intense heat, but mostly in the afternoon. Mornings and evenings are mild typically. And if you have a pool, you actually start to look forward to the heat. The other 7 months of the year the weather is better than anywhere else.