Anniversary flowers in Scottsdale

Most cities send anniversary flowers to a house. Scottsdale sends a startling share of them to a resort, because the anniversary trip here is a local institution as well as a tourist one: couples from Chicago and Minneapolis book the same room for the same week every year, and couples from Phoenix and Gilbert drive twenty minutes for two nights and call it a holiday. That single fact changes how you should order. A resort will not take a courier to a guest room — not at The Phoenician on East Camelback Road in 85251, not at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess on East Princess Drive up in 85255, not at Hotel Valley Ho in Old Town, the Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch on East Doubletree Ranch Road, The Westin Kierland in 85254, Talking Stick Resort on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land in 85256, The Scott or the Andaz on North Scottsdale Road, or The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch. Flowers go to a bell desk or a receiving door, and somebody on staff places them. That is normal and it works — but it means the reservation name, spelled as the hotel has it, and the check-in date are more important to us than the room number, which nobody knows until the guests arrive.

There is a second address quirk here that costs people a day. Several of the resorts with Scottsdale mailing addresses are not physically in Scottsdale at all: the Camelback Inn, Sanctuary, Mountain Shadows and the Omni Montelucia all sit in 85253, within the Town of Paradise Valley, a separate municipality wrapped around Camelback and Mummy Mountain with almost no commercial frontage. The mail says Scottsdale; the jurisdiction does not. It makes no difference to us — all of it is inside the eighteen-mile grid drawn from 85251 — but it matters when somebody tries to verify an address against a city and concludes the hotel does not exist. The same trick runs in the opposite direction in 85254, the ZIP north of the Kierland and Quarter corridors that carries a Scottsdale mailing address over land that is mostly City of Phoenix. Locals call it the magic ZIP. If an address looks contradictory on paper, it is probably one of these two cases rather than an error, and you should send it as written.

If the plan is dinner, decide in advance whether the flowers belong at the table or in the room, because the table is the harder of the two. Old Town and the Camelback corridor hold the restaurants people book for this — Café Monarch on East First Avenue, FnB on East Fifth Avenue, The Mission on North Brown Avenue, Virtù at the Bespoke Inn on Marshall Way, Mastro's City Hall on East Camelback, Ocean 44 and Dominick's on North Scottsdale Road — and none of them owe us anything. We have no arrangement with any of them and will not pretend otherwise. What works is calling the restaurant yourself and asking whether the host stand will hold a bouquet for a named reservation; plenty will, some will not, and a busy Saturday is not the night to find out by surprise. The alternative is better in most cases anyway: put the arrangement in the hotel room before dinner, so it is waiting when the evening ends rather than being carried through a dining room and then a parking garage. If the couple is driving home, the house is the third option and the best one in summer, because nothing sits in a hot car.