LESLIE'S JOURNAL

I think the road is teaching us a lot about the way we inhabit space and the way we think about where we are and where we're going. The terrain we're traveling through today is not unfamiliar to me. My father's family are from Oklahoma and I've traveled the interstate between Tulsa and Albuquerque, where I grew up, many many times. Its funny, because my familiarity with the I-40 Tulsa-Albuquerque drive made me less enthusiastic about this section of the trip than others - I thought I had seen enough of this part of the world to do me just fine. But making the drive on 66 instead of I-40 changes everything. I never really knew that all these little towns were out here or what they looked like or who lived in them.

Last night when we were at my dad's, he remarked that the way people used to travel was about going through places and the way we travel now is about bypassing places. So I have to retrain my instinct that 75mph is the normal speed for traveling and learn how to drive at 35 without becoming agitated that I'm 'not getting anywhere'.

Of course the web project takes a lot of our time and sometimes the 'virtual' seems to be crowding out the 'real' so that we aren't able to interact with where we are and who we meet as much as we'd like to. But the web project is important to us and despite the frustrations of having to tear apart hotel rooms to find the phone jack for the modem, it seems like a good way to communicate about this sort of experience. Like the arteries of the road, the WWW stretches in endless directions and has the potential to connect us with all sorts of people we might never encounter in our 'real' lives. What strikes me about the web is that, like the slow pink concrete road that dipsiedoodles through El Reno, Oklahoma, it takes a little patience to travel. I know that people who are sharing this journey with us are investing some time in front of their computers, waiting for these entries and these photographs to download and to those fellow travelers I want to say thank you for investing in us the way we are trying to invest in the places we visit.

It might please you to know that all the while I've been writing this I've been watching two old cowboys, one in a black hat, one in a white hat, sit and smoke and talk and stare out the window at the occasional pickup truck cruising by the old Calmez Hotel across the street. They're both wearing western cut pearl snap button shirts that remind me of my grandpa Buddy, whose 1957 Thunderbird shaped shaving lotion bottle is now traveling with us - a little something we're taking with us.