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LESLIE'S JOURNAL |
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| Date: 29th April
| Time: 11:55pm | Place:La Quinta, Room 210 | |||
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This morning I woke up at 5:45am and wanted to spring out of bed and write my journal page then and there, my head was so full of thoughts and reflections on the project. But of course, it seemed a bit silly to write my journal page before the day had happened, so I contained my enthusiasm. Now as I sit down to write, my head is so full of all the things that happened today that I can't remember what I was so excited about at daybreak. The hardest thing about the web site is not finding things to put in, but having to decide what to leave out, as we always have so many photographs and so many things to write about. Anyway, today we met Bob who runs the Old Route 66 Visitor's Center in Huckberry. We were in a bit of an excited hurry to get up the road to Mildred and Vera's to say hello and have some eggs over easy with hash browns, toast and coffee, but we decided to call in to the visitor's center for a moment just for a little look. Thank heavens we did - Bob is one of the most generous, wonderful people we've met along the route. He loved the idea of 'give and take' that we practice as we travel and he insisted on giving us more things than we could carry gracefully, including two wooden nickels (Julie, I know you expressly advised us not to take any on the chat page, but these are redeemable for Cozy Dogs in Bob's father's establishment on Route 66 in Springfield, Illinois...never mind that fact that we're vegetarians and so is Bob). In turn we left Bob with some Rough Scottish Oatcakes and a 1940s map of Scotland. Being an artist, cartographer and map collector, he was delighted with one gift, if somewhat puzzled by the 'roughness' of the other. On the way out I noticed an 'O.J. Bounty Collection' can on his desk. It really was a day of old and new acquaintances, as we hardly managed to tear ourselves away from Bob's place to get up the road to see Mildred and Vera and from there to meet George and Kelly up the road at the Snow Cap shake shack. Maybe its something to do with the way people relate to each other in these huge wide-open unpeopled spaces, but meeting up with our old acquaintances (none of whom we've met more than once or known for more than a month) inspired a real sense of joy and occassion. Oh, I just remembered what I was going to write about this morning - it was about how much we loved reading the chat page last night and seeing the messages from people we know and people we haven't yet met in the flesh. One message that particularly excited us was from Nina Pope, who made a travelogue web site retracing the journey of Johnson and Boswell through the islands and highlands of Scotland last summer. We've never met, but after Helen and I started working on our project someone passed on Nina's site address, so now we've traveled with her and she has traveled with us. Isn't life a funny thing? |
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