The Trip to AZ with QZ

I never really imagined I’d find myself in the desert of Arizona surrounded by cacti and Native American gift shops and breath-taking red rock landscape. The FamilyOh isn't the pack-up-the-RV-and-drive-out-west type. We beach, and we don’t exactly go far to do it. But Thursday evening, there I was at JFK boarding a plane to Sedona with QZ to attend his friends’ wedding. Having grown up in San Diego, QZ was amused that cacti were exotic to me – the suburbs of Philadelphia being rather un-desert-like and all. Did you know that the saguaro cactus can live for more than 150 years? And they start growing arms around age 75 to increase their reproductive capacity, which is dependent upon the pollination by bats and whitewing dove?

Early Friday morning, we excitedly arrived at a local bike shop for a guided mountain bike adventure. Well. Our tour guide, determined to show us city roadies just what MTBing is all about, took us on an intermediate level trail. Road bike skills do NOT translate to mountain bike skills, and what he deemed “intermediate” was more like “impossible.” My scrapes and bruises from the crash at Harlem two weeks ago were just finally healing, but after a few hours of struggling and falling on this death-defying trail I’m back to looking like a human punching bag. There was blood, oh, there were tears, but sweat, not so much because I had to dismount every few minutes to walk the stupid mountain bike up some steep rock formation. The entire experience was a battle royal between my determination not to give up and my threshold for pain. Even QZ, whose bike-handling skills far surpass mine, nearly fell a few times and had to walk his bike, too. I had been hoping to love mountain biking, maybe even add another weapon to my two-wheeled arsenal, but I ended up feeling discouraged and aching everywhere.

After that disheartening introduction, Arizona was not off to a great start. We then met up with the wedding group for a very cool hike up the beautiful Cathedral Rock trail and I decided that maybe Arizona wasn’t so bad. After some margaritas by the hotel pool (mixed expertly by QZ in a bike water bottle) and a delicious Mexican dinner with another couple, the morning’s mountain bike debacle was a distant memory and I had to admit that Arizona was completely wonderful.

On Saturday morning we went back to our bike shop and this time went with what we’re best at: road bikes. Armed with a map and directions from the cool bike shop dudes, we wound our way through Red Rock State Park, past ranches and along old dirt roads, and we only had to walk our bikes once – to cross a creek! The wedding ceremony took place that afternoon outside on a ranch set at the foot of a red rock mountain and even though the rental car’s thermometer said 104 degrees, it didn’t feel too hot. We had a great time dancing at the reception, and I did not, for the record, catch the bouquet. Just saying.

We spent our last day in Arizona exploring the town a bit – on four wheels instead of two. First we took a drive up to Chapel of the Holy Cross, which is a church built right into the landscape. Then we headed into the heart of Sedona, a shopping district peppered with Southwestern art galleries and New Age gift shops. Sedona, we learned from our explorations, has a touch of the crazy. It’s really no wonder why. For starters, there isn’t all that much to do besides admire the landscape. This landscape, arid and red with huge mystical sandstone formations shooting into the atmosphere, seems to a lot of people like the kind of place Martians might land if they were looking for a home away from home. Then there are the vortexes (no, not vortices), which are believed to be spiraling concentrations of spiritual energy (no, not wind). We skipped the vortexes tour and opted instead for psychic readings at the New Age Center. Yes, really.

Now, I’ve said it before: the stars know things. For a visual-based pragmatist, I give astrology a bit more credence than I’d like to admit in intelligent company, but I have moments where I know things without knowing how I know them. Sure, I always just chalked this up to intuition, but the psychic I met with said that actually this is because I’m a “transmitter.” Go on...

Madison Morgan, the psychic from Midtown East Manhattan, started off the reading by staring intently at me while asking basic contact information questions. She did some funky math on her notepad and declared me a Five of Spades – the genius card (ha!). Somehow that corresponds to the Ten of Hearts, the promoter card, which makes me a born leader and influencer. “You don’t like people telling you what to do!” she declared most accurately. I’m listening...

She next closed her eyes and read my aura. My head color was white/red, which means “majestic,” while my body color glowed green to mean healing (perhaps she noticed the HUGE bruise on my elbow?) She moved on to my palms, and that’s when things got really interesting. I’m going to live a long life and I’ll never be without a mate (possibly because my relationships have the tendency to overlap?) and I’m going to have two children. My fortune line isn’t yet complete, but I’ll always be financially secure. Writing is a good career for me, though I should consider screen plays ("Fuck the short stories, you want to make money, right?"), and she sensed a disconnect between writing and technology for me, which explains why I usually longhand everything before typing on the computer.

“Are you in love?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
"Does he have a lot of money?"
"Um, no?" He's a journalist with a cycling habit.

According to Madison, QZ isn’t The One for me because he’s too much in his own head, and he has fears, and as a Seven of Clubs he has an addictive personality that I should watch out for.

(Her: He could even become addicted to sex. Me: That wouldn't be so bad.)

Anyway, she said I should stay open because she sees someone else is in my future, someone with a lot of money. She was really into me having money.

Well, maybe the stars don’t know everything.

I mused over everything Madison said while we got relaxing hot stone massages, and then we took a drive up the switchbacks toward Flagstaff before hitting the highway for our redeye home to New York. Now that I’m back and the jetlag has subsided, I'm left with that unmistakable feeling that I'm a tiny bit different than I was before, a little more complete for having gone on this trip with QZ. I put my regular life on hold for a few days and it made me want more of that new-exciting-experiences feeling. Maybe it really is time to let go of New York and see what the rest of the country has to offer. And maybe what Madison saw on my palm wasn't a new man in my life but a new place for me to call home.