I've been a little absent lately, mostly because for most of the summer I spent most of the working day staring dumbly at the computer screen and in my free time wanted to practice my distance vision as much as I could. One day, I accidentally discovered that Leland accounts can, in fact, run custom cgi scripts, thus enabling the installation of Moveable Type. You just have to request activation of this ability.

I've not even come close to moving over my archives from the hand-coded days yet, but have decided to jump-start the move to the MT-generated system because pretty soon I'll be embarking on three weeks of sporadic internet access and and sporadic showers.

I guess it all began at the very end of freshman year, when Molly and I were heading to the library for our home stretch of finals studying. Desperate to leave school, even if only imaginarily, we thought, Wouldn't it be really cool to take a long, long bike trip somewhere?

"Yeah! Like in Australia, perhaps."
"From Sydney—"
"—To... [picks random Australian city] Perth!"

Thus buoyed, we hurried inside to check out Sydney and Perth on an atlas. Being the silly Americans that we were, we'd picked two cities that were 4,000 miles apart along the coast. Hm.

"Um... maybe we should shoot a little lower for our first long bike trip."
"Seattle to San Francisco, or something of the sort."
"Yes! How about next summer?"

After which finals took over and the idea slowly rotted in the backs of our minds.

Five months later, in November or December 2002, Alex got the great idea of biking across the country, and dragging me (who'd really talked up my new baby, a secondhand older Cinelli, during the intervening summer) along. The cross-country trip turned out to be a bit long to fit in around the other things to be done this summer, plus I wanted to hold up the deal with Molly even if Molly thought I was crazy for actually remembering and wanting to do it, and so we defaulted back to the original Seattle-to-SF plan.

PJaffe lived in the room next to Molly and Michelle spring quarter and amazed us with the fanaticism and black-greased fingers required to completely disassemble a bicycle, repaint the frame, and reassemble it. He makes a mean fried egg. Cognizance of that, combined with the news that he was going to be working in a bike shop for the summer, made us comandeer him for the trip, of course.
Peter, Molly, Alex, and I are flying into Seattle on Monday, August 25 2003 and plan to block traffic by riding four abreast on Stanford's Palm Drive for our junior year by the third week of September. Along the way we'll cut down southern Washington and try to get a permit to hike Mount Saint Helens, visit the Tillamook cheese factory, feel very, very small alongside the tall redwoods of northern California, and a host of other things.

In the past few days we've been sending a flurry of email amongst the four of us, and right now I'm undergoing the mother of all packing: conducting an exhaustive survey and weigh-in of things to be taken on the bike trip, and boxing everything else I'll need for school so my parents can ship it out to Hammarskjold in a few weeks. I'll be posting a little from the road whenever we can hit up local public libraries, and sometimes even have a town name where mail can be sent General Delivery. And now, off to find bungee cords!