Embry-Riddle Prescott, AZ

Today James and I visited Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's Prescott Arizona campus. This is the first stop on the two stop tour to help me figure out if I want to go to this school. Riddle's Daytona Beach Florida campus tour is next week. I was admitted into the aerospace engineering program at the Daytona Beach campus a few weeks ago. Now I'm off to figure out if I could live in either place.

Prescott Arizona is about 100 miles north of Phoenix and is a pretty pleasant drive if you can ignore all the Arizona drivers on your ass or flying down the freeway at 100 mph. The map below will show you where Prescott is in relation to Phoenix.Prescott is a cute little town and I could see myself living there. You can find out more about Prescott on the city's web site: http://www.cityofprescott.net/. The web site also has a bunch of neat photos taken by local photographers.

James managed to sum up my requirements for a location to live in two conditions: first, the location doesn't frighten me to my core, and second, it doesn't overtly piss me off. Happily, Prescott did neither. Also, on the plus side for Prescott, it's out of the valley floor where Phoenix is, and it was about 10-20 degrees cooler than Phoenix was today. It was in the mid-80's in Prescott, and while descending out of the mountains in the car back to Phoenix, the thermometer rose back up to 103 on the freeway. Yikes.

Once we got to Prescott, we stopped at Watson Lake Park to stretch and take in the scenery. Below are some really neat pictures of this park with all it's rock formations.We got to Riddle early, about 11am, and our tour was scheduled for 1pm. Fortunately the student doing the tours that day had no 11am and was able to take us early. A nice young fellow named Brian did the tour. He was only 20 (gulp) and was in one of the frats.
The tour included all of the usual stuff, classrooms, community centers, and so on, and because I marked that I was going to major in aerospace engineering, we got to check out a lot of the engineering facilities including wind tunnels, a small little single-stage turbine engine, and a couple of other full size engines that the engineering students play around with. Riddle has a nice computer set up in nearly all the classrooms (still using Win2k, but oh well) and they have a super neat weather room with a bunch of computers dedicated to gathering weather information. They also had a neat plasma on the wall that is ordinarily displaying worldwide satellite weather but was off since graduation was the week prior.

The best part of the tour was a trip over to the Prescott airport and a tour of Embry-Riddle's flight line facilities. This included a tour of the simulator building. Embry-Riddle's Prescott campus has several big sims for 172s and Piper Seminoles. The neat simulators were the ones with full mock-Cockpits and 180 degree projection screens. They also had several panel only simulators for procedure work. They also have an Airbus A320 simulator, but it wasn't available for me to see. Here's me checking out one of the Seminole simulators with the projection screens.After looking around in the simulator building, we went out to the flight line and I had a chance to check out the real thing.After the tour, we headed back into the downtown area of Prescott, and had lunch at a little Mexican place. Before we headed back to Phoenix, we strolled around the downtown area a bit, and the Yavapai County court house. In front is a statue dedicated to the rough riders.
Back in Phoenix we met up with Barnsey and spent some time by the pool. It was after all, still about 100 degrees.