This morning Emily and I woke up relatively early and found a place to get a cup of coffee. I've taken to drinking double Americano's again. It started in Berkeley when we got coffee at The French Hotel (still the best cups of the trip)

Emily is leaving today so we emptied out everything from my car onto the sidewalk in front of the coffeehouse. The car had become quite a wreck in the last few days, it was nice to take stock of what I have and to put it all back according to the now forgotten Feng Shui principles that I learned last month.

I am leaving the Gocco printer with Emily, I kind of implied that she can pay me for it latter but, I think I'm just going to give it to her. I have enough stuff as it is. I also gave here my ratty old sweatshirt, an item that never made it on Ebay. I guess I've been driving around the a bunch of unsold itemsÉMy goal is to give them all given away before I head back to Iowa.

LM used to wear this sweatshirt all over the place, and one day she decided it was too ratty to wear so I took it off her hands. Even latter still she kept trying to get rid of the old rag behind my back, I would often find it in the piles of stuff that she planned on taking to the Salvation Army and I think I even found it in the garbage once. Five years later I have been wearing it nearly every evening of this trip. Its cuffs are still in tatters, and the holes in the front and back are only getting bigger.

Well now it's owned by Emily, I hope that she has better luck with it than I have. Even Sasha kind of disliked the disrepair of this old friend. I wonder if Emily will patch the holes and fix the cuffs? I guess it could use some love. Emily packed pretty light for the trip, she can fit everything she owns on her back and in her arms, She's all set for boarding the train for Colorado. Doesn't she want to go to texas?

There is a four-lane highway that runs from Clines Corners, New Mexico to Roswell. I drove on it most of my way to lubbock and think that I was literally the only person on the highway going in either direction. Why is there a four-lane highway to Roswell?

Well it has nothing to do with traffic volume. Somewhere along the way I turned off onto a two-lane road that ran ruler strait in both direction for what looked like hundreds of miles. I turned on my heat and decided to see how long I could keep the needle on my speedometer up above the 100 mark. After a while I started to feel like I was driving a little slow.. I soon slowed down to 85 and continued on my way.

The landscape of west central Texas looks like Iowa. Flat for miles with crops of one kind or another on every rolling inch. It amazing how quickly the landscape changed at the Texico, Texas, going from the desert of the of the southwest to the plains of the Midwest. Did the founders of Texas draw their border around every tillable inch of land they could find?

I arrived in Lubbock and hour our two later than I expected. One reason was because I had to stop at the grave of Billy the Kid and the other is that I jumped another time zone brining me right back to the same zone as Iowa. I called Sasha and asked her what time it was tonight and then I told her that it was the same time in Texas.. Closer to home than ever.

I drove to Texas to meet up with Cris, a theatre major in school in Lubbock who bought the bread and puppet theater posters that used to be on my Kitchen wall, we met up at a local bar and he bought the posters with him. There is a photography conference in town this weekend and the Keynote speaker was Lucy Lippard, the conference was mostly over by the time that Cris and I found some of the stragglers in the hotel lounge. We met up with a few friends of his and headed out to have a few beers.

The waitress laughed when I asked if they carried Lone Star bottles. Laughed. They had Coors Light, Bud Light and Lite on tap and she was laughing at the prospect of someone ordering Lone Star. Isn't Lone Star the beer of Texas? I ordered two.. It's not the greatest beer but I'm in Texas.

We ate lunch at the Roadrunner CafŽ in Gallup, New Mexico. One more state away from the ocean. The daily special was meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Not a piece of fish on the entire menu and its Friday. So I gave myself permission to end my self imposed fish attack, even if there was fish on the menu its no fresher than what I can get in Iowa, so there no longer a sense of urgency.

Since we left California we have crossed much of what used to be old highway 66, we even tried to find that Route 66 song on the various swing dance CD's that Emily brought with her. But today we just stayed on the interstate all the way to Albuquerque. I think that our 8 hour drive through the desert cured us of our blue highway tendencies. It was so nice to motor on through the rocky Arizona landscape, into the identical miles of New Mexico.

Emily is going to take the train tomorrow. So I will no longer be able to ride in the passenger seat of my car for a while. It looks like she will have to print the covers of the book a little later this week. She's on her way to Denver for a while to hang out with Lincoln.

Emily printed our book today. I think we are going to call it "five for free" in reference to the free copies that inspired the book. There is not enough paper for the cover here so Emily might finish it when we get to Albuquerque tomorrow. I found a Kinkos that let me plug into their Ethernet network for an hour or so tonight. $15 an hour for internet time.. I'm starting to appreciate the access that I had as a student in Iowa.

I spent the day sitting at the desk in my room in front of my laptop, I kind of felt like John Tutturro in Barton Fink, except I don't think that the devil incarnate was living next door.

Every time that I have driven through Flagstaff Arizona the glowing red sign of the De Beau youth hostel offered me the promise of an affordable room and an interesting group of people to hang out with for the evening. Flagstaff is one of the closest real towns to the Grand Canyon and the two Hostels in town are mostly filled with European travelers making their required pilgrimage to the largest hole in the world.

I stayed at the De Beau when I drove through on my way to Utah after Temporama 3's southern state adventure. Most of the people I met had let their Visa's expire and we volunteering at the De Beau as a way to pay for their rooms. Some of them would lead tours to the Grand Canyon for spending money and others would do under the table work in town. There were always 8 to 10 people in the common area playing pool and drinking beer. I only stayed for the night but I wanted to stay forever.

When Emily and I arrived today I gave her the appropriate rights and lefts from my passenger seat and we rolled up to the front door of the De Beau. There was a "do not enter sign" on the Door and a note instructing patrons to the Grand Canyon Youth Hostel around the corner. Apparently the owners of the other youth hostel bought the De Beau last year and only use the rooms when their hostel is overflowing during the summer months. We asked if we could have a room the De Beau anywise but the hostel was half empty so we stayed in the main building.

When Emily and I were in Santa Barbara we walked into a copy place that had a sign on the wall that said "the first five copies are free". So we went back to the car and collected various items to make our five free photo copies from. Our a plan is to make a book with the Gocco Machine that I bought in San Francisco. I think that I will give the machine to Emily when we finish the book. While I am sitting her typing she is making the first test exposures on the Gocco Screens. I think that we might stay here an extra day.

I am going to get as much posted to the site as I can, there is no phone line in the room, so I'll have to ask if I can plug into the main line downstairs. If you've been following along you can see that I have been less than regular with my postings. I'm not sure if I am cut out for the day to day demands of maintaining a travelogue Web-site. I'd much rather just hang out with the folks I'm visiting. ThatÕs why I want to stay an extra day here, then I can get some work done with out having to worry about writing about another person that I visited. This will be the first "Day Off" I've taken in a month.

When Katherine invited us to spend the night in Claremont, Emily and I made momentary eye contact and it was easy to see that she felt like getting on the road and camping somewhere between there and Las Vegas. I felt that way too. I have been staying with people for the last two months and apart from my brief nap in Shasta last week, I hadn't camped since the first weeks of my trip.

We drove east and west on I-15 and started climbing up into the desert, we stopped at the fist camping triangle on the map and tried to find a place to pitch our tent. We couldn't find the campground b/c there are no exit #s on California interstate so it was impossible for us to figure out which of the unnamed exit was the one with the campground at it. We drove up and down a section of road that was part of Old Route 66, but couldn't find a place to camp, so when got back on the highway for a while until we found a well marked exit with camping nearby. We found a place about ten miles off of the highway called Silverwood State Park and got the tent set up by 10 O'clock or so.

It was so nice to see the stars again. The giant U-turn had been made. I've been driving West for the last month and today we finally fully turned the car to the east. Away from the bright lights of the West Coast and towards the lifeless lands of the estern California desert. So far away but not quite, I still had cell phone coverage so after the tent was set up and we were sipping hot tea, we checked our email as pack of Coyotes hollered back an forth across the valley. Cell coverage in the California dessert? Of course.