Rock 'n' Roll Quiz

Cross-Country Trip, Day 4

Sedona, Day 2

We started our first (and last) full day in Sedona with a 3.7 mile hike.  There are lots of hiking trails to choose from and we picked the one right outside our back door.   The trail was narrow, the earth red and the views spectacular.

The earth and rocks here are a beautiful deep red from the iron oxide and they produce a deep feeling of happiness.  Oh, sorry, no, that was the ice cream.  (Kidding.  I don't eat ice cream anymore.) 

After the walk, we made our way into town and wandered around Tlaquepaque, a little shopping village with archways, stone streets, and plazas that are reminiscent of old Europe.  

We meandered into the art galleries and gift shops to admire beautiful sculptures of bronze, wood and clay, most of which I didn't photograph because (a) it wasn't allowed and (b) I was too busy looking at it.   Here's one I managed to get:

Native Women in Clay

I don't how these wonderful artists pay the rent because I didn't see anyone buying anything except in the gift shops selling practical items like these signs.

We ended up at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park where Buddhist monks were chanting and conducting evening prayers, and Marina decided to build her own mini-stupa.

She became obsessed and couldn't stop building them and every time I turned around, she was building another one.   

One of Marina's many stupas

 
Our final stop of the day was the ChocolaTree for a cup of the nano-green tea and some more cardamom rose chocolate.  The silver-haired man behind the register recognized us from the previous night.  He poured the tea and put the tiny little cardamom rose chocolates in a waxed bag.  He offered us a free chocolate if we could guess the name of the band playing the song on the radio.  It was a familiar one from the '60s, used in a lot of movies.

"I'll give you a hint," he said.  It's the only rock and roll band with the same name as a chocolate."  Hershey's?  Mars?  M&M?  Milky Way?

The song continued, we sang the chorus ("me and you and you and me, no matter how they toss the dice, it had to be, the only one for me is you and you for me, so happy together, so happy together, how is the weather, so happy together") and still the name wouldn't come.

"They had a lot of hits after this," the man said.  We went through every '60s band we could think of: the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, the Carpenters, but none of them were chocolates.

He put another piece of chocolate on the counter.  It was the same size and shape as a Reese's peanut butter cup but made, he said, from the "finest cacao in the world."  The only ingredients were cacao, almonds and agave.  We decided to take two, and they sat on the counter waiting for us to guess the band's name.  Finally, we gave up.

"The Turtles," he said.

The Turtles?  We would have been there all night.

Then another classic rock'n'roll song started playing, and he said, "I like you guys so I'm going to give you another chance."

"Pink Floyd," I said.

"No, it's the Rolling Stones," Marina said.

"Correct," the man said.  "But name the drummer."

"Brian Jones," Marina said.  "He was one of the original members."

"Yes, but he wasn't the drummer."

"Let's see, there were three original members," Marina said.  "Mick, Keith and Brian.  Who was the fourth?"

"No idea," I said.

A line had started to form and he helped the customer behind us.  When he disappeared behind a back counter, Marina turned to me and said, "Quick, look it up on your phone."

"I'm not doing that! That's cheating!  Plus what if he comes back and sees me doing it?"  Two seconds later, the man reappeared.

"Bill!  It's Bill something," Marina said.  "His last name starts with W.  Bill Wyman."

The man behind the counter smiled knowingly.  I started to wonder if there was some sort of spiritual meaning to this exercise or whether this was the way white people bonded.  We were still standing at the counter with the chocolate in front of us and I just wanted us to pay for it and leave.

"You're on the right track," he said.  "It starts with W."

"White.  Wyeth. Wightman. Wyatt."

"How much is the chocolate?  Can you just ring us up?"  I said.

"You're getting confused by the first name. It's not Bill."

"It's not?  It's not Bill Wyatt?"

The man dispensed various liquids into a blender for the customers behind us.  "I'm going to give it to you because you're so close.  It's Charlie Watts."

"That's close to Bill Wyatt?" I said.

He shrugged, rang up $3 for one of the cacao cups and gave us the other for free.  That's right.  $3 for a chocolate the size of a single Reese's cup.  The chocolate was strong and bitter, and I'm glad we only had to pay for one.  

As we got into the truck, Marina said, "What does turtle have to do with chocolate?"

Sunset in Sedona

Mural outside ChocolaTree

Green Tea Buzz

Cross-Country Trip Day 3, afternoon

Sedona, Arizona

We left the Grand Canyon and drove through stunning scenery to Sedona, on route 180 and route 89A.  Our windshield has become a bug graveyard and no amount of gas-station cleaning seems to help.   Still, I managed to get this picture.  

San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff

The landscape changed to pine forests and red rock as we wound our way down Route 89A and entered the Village of Oak Creek, just outside Sedona.

Route 89A to Sedona

Sedona is absolutely charming.  Ringed by hills of red rock, the town is full of low-lying adobe and stucco buildings painted in earth tones to look as if they emerged from the land.  Lots of cute restaurants, art galleries and new age shops selling crystal, sage, aura readings and vortex tours.

If you missed the groovy '60s (or want to relive it), spend an evening at the ChocolaTree in Sedona.  The women wear long patterned skirts, flowy tops, and scarves and the men wear anything that was reasonably clean and within reach that morning.  Everyone makes extended eye contact and gives you their undivided attention whether you're talking about the daily special or soul-mind-body connection.  They also all seem to have beautiful smooth skin.   

After a satisfying vegan meal, we had some of the chocolate that the shop is famous for (the cardamom rose cup was divine!) and a mason jar of nano-green tea that the busboy recommended as absolutely potent.  About halfway through the tea, my eyes began to glaze over and I began to feel very very mellow.  I couldn't stop smiling and I started swaying to the electronic lounge music.  Time slowed down and it seemed as though I could sit forever, I should sit forever, in this little cafe listening to the music and watching the dance of people ordering, eating, talking, leaving, and then the whole thing repeating again with people who were different and yet the same.  Each time the effects started to wear off, I took another sip of the tea and the sense of complete relaxation returned.  I decided I'd better bring some of that tea back to Miami with me and drink it every time I have to get on the phone with someone.  

What's Your Colorado River?

Cross-Country Trip, Day 3 morning

Still at the Grand Canyon

Unless you're an amateur scientist, it's hard to understand the intricacies of how the Grand Canyon was created.  We sat through two presentations and read every plaque in the Yavapai Geology Museum, and I still can't quite figure it out.  But what I did take away was this:    

The Grand Canyon was once the Colorado Plateau, a flat expanse of land with a river coursing through it.  Over hundreds of millions of years, snowmelt, runoff, sediment, gravity, and the forces of physics all had a hand in shaping the land, eroding it downward and exposing the layers of rock we see now.   Without the Colorado River, there would be no Grand Canyon.  The River shaped the Canyon, literally creating it when rapids and sediment (including truck-sized boulders) came pounding down from higher elevations and slammed and ground into existing rock.  Eventually, the rock gave way.  Which got me thinking:  We all start out as flat as the original plateau, with our own individual versions of a Colorado River running right through the middle of us, and bringing with it the irresistible forces that come tumbling through and shape us, creating crevices and tributaries, and eroding parts of us that we once thought were true and hard as rock, forming a new landscape.   Too much?  OK, let me get back to the travelogue.    

The Canyon walls are mesmerizing.  The deep rich colors, the way layers of rock seem to flow down like melted chocolate, the sheer scale of it. 

Space flattens distance, says the plaque in the Geology Museum, but you can't understand what that means until you stand at the south rim and look north.  The north rim is over 9 miles away yet it seems, if not close enough to touch, not very far either.  If you hovered in a helicopter over the middle of the canyon, level with the rim, and dropped your sunglasses, they would fall more than a mile down, but again, it seems a lot closer.   Our eyes deceive us, and maybe that's a survival mechanism because if we knew how far we had to go, we'd never start the journey.  

The strange thing about the Canyon is that its most influential cause is barely visible.  From the rim, the Colorado River can only be seen in tiny little patches more than a mile below.  But videos of white-water rafting in the visitors' center left us with visions of our return trip.  Next time, we're going to see the Canyon from the bottom up.  

Pine Forest Below the Rim

The Grand Canyon

Cross-Country Trip, Days 1 and 2

Grand Canyon

After a week of packing up everything in our house, our apartment and our storage unit so we can temporarily relocate (don't say move!) to Belize and Miami for business, we set off on our cross-country adventure from Los Angeles.  We were going to fly back and ship the truck to Miami (and then to Belize) but thanks to a suggestion by our ever-practical and lovely Ukrainian neighbor Olga, we decided to drive instead since it was something we had always wanted to do and it seemed a shame to leave LA without my having seen the Grand Canyon. (Marina had been twice before -- once on the drive over from Miami and another time riding her horse on the North Rim).  Of course, I haven't seen Hawaii either but that's in the opposite direction and not exactly driving distance, so that trip will have to wait.

We didn't have anything we would ordinarily bring on a trip like this (our shorts, our Nikon binoculars, my digital hybrid almost-DSLR camera with zoom lens, a rented RV), but we did have 3 boxes of files, four suitcases, a table saw, a work table with vise, Marina's horse trimming tools, and some other stuff that wouldn't fit in our shipping container.  We were reluctant to leave LA and already planning the return.  Maybe that's why on the day of our scheduled departure, we couldn't leave till 3 in the afternoon.      

The scenery from LA to the Grand Canyon was spectacular.   Vast expanses of desert wilderness, ringed by mountains and dotted with yucca trees, sage brush, and a smattering of plastic bottles and bags.   This part of the West is truly wild and you can see the ghosts of dead cowboys forever wandering the mountain passes in search of fortune and revenge.  

About 3 hours out of LA

Over the border and into Arizona

Eventually we crossed the border into Arizona and after a few hours more of night-time driving, we got to the town of Williams around 10 o'clock at night. This adorable old West town has great architecture and lots of hotels catering to tourists visiting the Grand Canyon (see pics below, which aren't mine).   Too bad we got there at night when the streets were silent and the tourists were all in bed resting up for an early morning start. 

Williams, Arizona

We pressed on in the dark on the long lone highway for an additional 60 miles to the Grand Canyon.  I was grateful that we were on this road alone and not early in the morning with thousands of other vehicles in a big long traffic jam.  The night sky was lit up with stars that you can't see in cities, and we were rewarded with a view of two enormous elk grazing by the roadside as we neared the entrance to the Canyon, and a grey fox scurrying across the road.   Thank goodness for google maps and mobile internet because there were no signs directing us to the Grand Canyon Village or the hotel we had booked just 4 hours earlier.  (In keeping with the spontaneity of this trip, we're doing very little advance planning.)

We must have got the last room in the hotel because it's smaller than the room in a Parisian bordello and with a view of the parking lot, but all was forgotten the next morning when we stepped out of the hotel and into this view:

Our first glimpse of the Grand Canyon

I won't bore you with 800 pictures of the Grand Canyon but if you haven't been and you appreciate nature, it's really spectacular and worth a visit.   You cannot appreciate the vastness of it until you have seen it in person.  We walked along the rim, and took the shuttle to various viewpoints.  Then we hiked down into the Canyon just enough to get a sense of what it feels like to stand small against these giant walls of rock and get away from all the people.    Soon the weather changed abruptly, as it often does here, and we hiked back up in a cold windy drizzle.   The sound of the wind rushing through the canyon is a beautiful and haunting sound.  Next time I visit, I want to hike all the way down to the Colorado River, stay a night or two and hike all the back up.       Tomorrow, we're off to Sedona, Arizona. 

Below the rim