I didn't really do anything for my birthday this year, in part because I just wanted some downtime (rather than go to Pantheacon I stayed in a hotel and caught up on my reading, and later on went on a coffee shop crawl) and in part because my birthday gift this was a a road trip to Joshua Tree, California for a long weekend in March. It's been a long time since I was last in the high desert and, even though it didn't seem like it at the time I was looking forward to both the road trip as …
While Jason and I were driving cross-country late last year, we tried to clear two states a day to make sure that we'd get to the west coast on time. This usually meant setting out at 1000 hours local time, loading our luggage into the TARDIS, and putting the pedal to the metal. This usually wan't too big a deal because we usually started a day's travel from a half to a third of the way across a given state to begin with. Near the end of our journey, however, the only viable route meant clearing the state of Arizona …
It's me, the Doctor, checking in after an entire weekend on the road. At this moment I've found lodgings in a quaint little hotel about forty miles into the high desert of California, which is about a two hour drive from LAX when you factor in traffic. As my cow-orker T- says, "I love LA. There are ten-lane highways and everyone's still doing fifteen miles per hour." I'm running on about four hours of sleep right now, so I'm going to try to hit the high points before I fall over unconscious.