LESLIE'S JOURNAL

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Date: 19th April
Time: 10:54pm Place: Barstow, CA

Well, I don't even know where to begin. Last night we stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is one of the most gorgeous places on earth - pine mountains in the middle of a big blue sky desert landscape. It was the first night of the trip that we've been able to go to bed at a decent hour, having learnt to make web pages whilst driving. This saves precious time, though it meant that Helen missed out on the sunset view coming into Flagstaff, her head concealed beneath the denim canopy of my shirt hanging from the sunvisor, shielding the computer screen from the blinding sun. I looked over at her and thought, 'This is ridiculous,'...but oh, how grateful I was to go to bed early.

I woke this morning in the best of spirits, immensely happy with where I was and what I was doing. As an afterthought, after answering our email, Helen and I decided to check out the site on-line and discovered that the journal pages weren't working at all. It looked to me like a problem of case sensitivity at the server, but as Helen and I don't update the server directly, there was nothing I could do to fix it beyond sending desperate emails to Huw in London.

This is the sort of thing that can really ruin a person's day - realising that all our efforts to communicate are at the mercy of a code I am barely literate in, and that one false move can make hours and hours of work null and void. What with traveling ten to twelve hours a day on a highway that disappears for miles at a time, detours and dead ends and constructing a web site live on-line every night, we are really living on the knife edge, caught somewhere between the past and future and unable to let our guard down in either. It serves us right for listening to a book-on-tape reading ofThe Oddessy before we left London.

Still, it was a glorious April day and even though the path from our hotel room to the outdoor pool was covered with snow (the elevation in Flagstaff is over 7,000 ft.), we were able to wear shorts quite comfortably. The scenery and the old road itself were more spectacular today than on any other day of our trip and so my 'virtual' worries were unable to impede my 'real' delight in our travels. The old road is magic. I'm already looking forward to traveling this stretch again on our way back from west to east. As we drove into Barstow tonight, the desert was illuminated by the bright almost-full moon, and Helen was illuminated by the glow of the Powerbook we run off the cigarette lighter...


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