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Cyber-guerillas that we are, Monday morning sees us hiding out at the back of the Best Western in Ozona, Texas, stealing their wireless internet (we stayed at the Best Value Inn) to check our emails. The modern road trip is one of searches for free wireless, the need for electricity to charge up our iPods, digital cameras and laptops, and sighs of frustration at running out of iPod juice while driving through ten hours of desert, or full memory cards. In other news, camping plans for near El Paso got scuppered by the most enormous, dramatic thunderstorm. And our dear little Fred, to continue his road-trip run-ins with the cops, nearly got packed off to a detention camp for six months for not having his passport with him when we had to go through a midnight road-block near the Mexico border. Apparently you can get chucked out of the country for not having your visa papers with you at all times. The guard had just confiscated about 60 pallets of marijuana out of a truck, which was sittin...

We are in California. Ventura, to be precise, having coffee and muffins. Berkeley was fun. San Francisco was foggy and a little bit like Brighton. We visited Ridge friends and re-realised how life is meant to be lived - at the top of a mountain, with a beautiful garden, perfect climate, and endless good food and wine. Will post later in more detail...

Sorry for lack of updates - being in the middle of the desert somewhat does that to you. However, I am incredibly thrilled to be able to report that Team Green Jeep has made it to the Pacific! Yesterday at around 5.15 pm we arrived in Berkeley, California, and saw the ocean. Wowee. Meanwhile, here's a day-by-day update of what we've been up to since I last had internet. Wednesday - we made it to Yellowstone. Nice but too crowded. Watched Old Faithful do its 100ft geyser thing which was sort-of impressive but the fact that you were there with 1000 other people somewhat diluted it. The smoking landscape did give an eery impression of the closeness of the centre of the earth, bubbling away, but actually we were generally underwhelmed by the more rocks&trees scenario. Hmm. But we camped in a beautiful place in Grand Teton NP - at least it was beautiful before the most immense thunderstorm exploded overhead and we were forced to leave our lovely campfire and our waiting dinner t...

OK. Finally have time and internet to update on the road trip. I can't believe that since Saturday afternoon we've gone over 2000 miles, from NYC to Cody, Wyoming, home of Buffalo Bill. To save words I'm just going to post my notes made en route at the end of every tiring and mind-boggling day. Saturday. Drove NYC-Chicago, left 3pm. Horrendous traffic getting out of Manhattan. Finally actually started moving at more than 5 mph at around 4pm, drove straight out through NJ and PA, ate dinner in PA at around 8.30. The sun had taken forever to set due to going west, which was quite unsettling and lovely. We decided to drive through the night to Chicago. I had a little doze first then drove from around 12.30 letting the others sleep like babies, trying not to rock. Got through Ohio. got off the turnpike for gas in Indiana, decide to take back roads around Lake Michigan despite it still being dark. We got into Chicago at exactly dawn. The city was totally deserted - its skyline a...

We're in Chicago. Or rather, in a Starbucks on the edge of Chicago, having left NYC at 3pm yesterday and driven through the night. We've done New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. Chicago is really stunning, but totally uninhabited, at least at 6am on a Sunday. Photos later.

More fun and games in the big city. My brain's a little blurred today from a rather late night last night but I'll try, for my own sake, to note down some highlights. Took the Central Line boat trip around the whole of Manhattan Island, complete with commentary by some wannabe classic NY actor which was initially irritating/hilarious but actually by the end, we had to admit that it was pretty interesting. Amazing to see the island from the waters, all classic hazy blue layers of skyscrapers. Went to see Chinatown at an outdoor screening practically under the Brooklyn Bridge - really fun, somehow very New York and could never happen in London due to lack of similar large left-over tracts of land and huge, dramatic bridges that make the perfect setting for urbanites to hang out of a Thursday night. Clapham Common just ain't the same, and neither is the South Bank. Ate delicious oysters for $1 each at Marlow & Sons . Have drunk a lot of cold beer. Have hung out a lot with ...

New York is really fun. Every time I'm here, I'm struck by how it really is just like the movies. The scale of the city, the real urbanity as opposed to London's rather ridiculous cramped Victorian terraces, the intensity of life...it's great. I could live here. And with the lovely exchange rate continuing to hold up, it still appears cheap. I'm also getting a blast of NYC architecture world stuff due to my architect friends here. It's such a crazy thing, so far from what I've been involved with recently. Crocodile-proof lap pools and suchlike. Fun, ridiculous, joyful, gossipy, self-referential...which is also what architecture should be about, not just the super-serious politicised stuff. But it's still amusing as I try to explain New Urbanism and how it has taken hold of middle America's urban planning scene to mystefied Manhattanites, or mention weird governmental policy acronyms to universal shrugs. However, Cameron Sinclair has made it onto the...

I have not only finally crossed the Mason-Dixon Line but have arrived intact in the Big Apple! Have (obviously) not had any internet for the last few days so will summarise briefly. 6th - Charlottesville, VA to Lewisburg, WV Went to see Monticello (Jefferson's house) in the morning. It's wonderful and eccentric, as expected, but the most enviable thing was his vegetable patch - huge, incredibly well-tended, beautiful. I would love to have such a garden, and love the passion that Jefferson seemed to have for cultivating the earth and experimenting with new species and methods. Afterwards, drove through the incredibly beautiful mountains, intending to get to a festival at Clifftop but inevitably didn't make it that far. But it didn't matter - I was utterly jaw-dropped by the beauty of the mountains and happy just driving. 7th - Lewisburg, WV to Bedford, PA. More beautiful mountain driving. Came literally face-to-face with a wind turbine - part of an array that stretches ...

A few links - I meant to post some of these the other day, but lost them when my computer crashed... LA water and power department is now giving away free trees to citizens. . Simple, graceful and highly replicable way of making our cities a little less energy-wasteful. Interesting post about why the 'sustainable design' literature rarely talks about political or social aspects. SDN doesn't have comments (why?!) so I'm linking to it instead. Obviously the market is (as an eco-lobbyist I was talking to the other day said) colluded against a lot of sustainable options as a result of subsidies, tax incentives etc which do require a legislative solution to correct, and which we need to lobby for. But I think the more interesting issue is maybe also how 'sustainable' options (goods, services, lifestyle choices, policies) are marketed to the public, and why they are still being argued for on the basis of some subjective ideas about 'ethics', 'green', ...

Washington, DC to Charlottesville, VA - 117 miles Ah, I'm back in the countryside. Big sigh of relief. Although my dutiful sightseeing this morning in DC ended up being quite fun - after tackling the totally unnavigable IM Pei wing of the National Gallery of Art, followed by the more navigable but far too vast old wing (beautiful Italian rennaissance saints and Rembrandts to restore my sanity), I gave in the the ultimate DC tourist attraction, the Air and Space Museum . It is absolutely packed as (unlike high art) it appeals to every tourist group that might pass through the city. It has a McDonalds and Wendy's as its 'food court'. But it's also really good fun, because they actually have the real deal to show you. The actual Apollo 11 command module. The actual airplane which the Wright brothers first flew in. Real long-range nuclear missiles from the USSR and the USA, cold-war style (without warheads, of course). The real backup Skylab space station that you can a...

Fredericksburg, VA to Washington DC - 54 miles. I've reached the Capital of this enormous country. It's an incredibly weird city. I drove in yesterday morning with a little bit of a 'soft landing' of lunch at a friend's house in a leafy suburb of the city. But then afterwards, I did like any redneck tourist, and pointed my vehicle in the direction of the seat of government - the Mall itself. After all, what else was I to do? and thus I entered a zone of impossibly big things. Enormous monolithic buildings, windowless and scaleless, separated by vast (and vaguely terrifying) boulevards. Hot, hot sidewalks with no people on them. That huge park, with its huge monuments to - well, what exactly does the Washington Monument embody? apart from that it doesn't take a fascist political system in order to erect an incredibly fascist monument, something from imperial Rome on crack? I got quite fazed out by it all, and the crazy city traffic which I am not used to at all, ...

I was rather tired when I finally found an affordable motel with internet tonight. So much so that I forgot to look at my odometer and see how far I went today. But I would estimate around 350 miles in the car, plus 27 by ferry. Took the ferry from Cedar Island to Ocracroke first thing in the morning. Ocracoke is really incredible - wild and beautiful sandy beaches stretching all along the island, with no people on them And this is August! If this place were in Europe it would be heaving and horrible. Yet somehow, here it still feels untouched, despite the tacky resort and condo-towns either side of it and well within an hours driving distance. I pulled over and dipped myself into the Atlantic (which is warm here!), and sunbathed for half and hour before hitting the road again, making a mental note that if I ever want to be a total beach bum, this is definitely a good place to do it. On from there northwards along the Outer Banks, things gradually get less romantic and more tacky. The...

423 miles, Savannah, GA to Cedar Island, NC. Today's mileage is also not that impressive - I spent more time than I would have liked in slow traffic but it was more than compensated for by the last 100 miles. From Savannah I went to Charleston, South Carolina, famous to me from 'Gone With The Wind' and all that stuff. I had very little expectation of what it might be like, apart from, presumably, very grand. It is that, but the smart, uber-restored downtown areas (all expensive clothes shops, lawyers offices and horesedrawn tourist rides, with what must be extremely expensive private houses) was much less interesting or surprising than the surrounding areas which also must be very old, but which are surprisingly run-down still in a beautiful-faded way, black neighbourhoods with people hanging out on the porches. The urban structure (again, what a nerd I am) was quite amazing - long, narrow lots where, to make the most of the plots, instead of having a front porch they built...

Oh dear. I feel like I have been terribly neglectful of this blog over the last couple of months. I'm sorry. I promise to post more often. Well, I will certainly because I am at the start of a six-week road trip all over the States so am going to be doing a lot of eating. And so I will write about it...and if any of you lovely readers who still actually read this have any suggestions about where/what to eat, any little secret places, please let me know! the route is meandering up from Savannah, GA (where I am tonight) to NYC to get my friends who are coming with me, then pretty much straight over to Berkeley, driving fast, then a slow meander back to Alabama via as many places as we can fit in. Well, today was officially the first day of the road trip, and I did some pretty good eating. Lunch was in Phenix City, AL, where I got mildly lost and then was quite pleased because it meant that I ate some really good barbecue. Believe it or not, I had not eaten barbecue yet since I got ba...

The first official day of my summer road trip saw me do a quite meagre 450 miles or so, from Newbern, AL to Savannah, GA, where I am now ensconced post- dinner in the glamour of the Days Inn, whose lack of charm is mitigated by its free in-room broadband. It wasn't a bad drive, a mixture of smaller roads and interstate, with weather rather like April in England, only much hotter - scattered, sudden, violent showers interspersed with sunshine. I passed through Peach County, GA which strangely seemed to have at least as many pecan groves as peach orchards. I got to listen to lots of the new stuff I put on my iPod from Butch's CD collection, which was really fun - lots and lots of old-time music, folk stuff and old men singing ballads and playing clawhammer banjo and fiddle. Now is really the time when I will get to find out what makes up the 9.6 days worth of music that I apparently have on my iPod... Savannah is really beautiful. I was most amazed by the (ach, I'm such a sp...

Yesterday's baseball game was a lot of fun, as usual, though less packed and crazy than normal due to the huge rainstorm earlier that left most people probably thinking it was rained out. I have a new digital camera (hooray!!) so I got to take pictures. Afterwards, we went to buy beer (technically illegal on Sundays, but there's one backroads store that sells it) and came back via the back roads to see the beautiful sunset over the fields. This area really is one of the most beautiful places I have been to, just made for riding around in a car down the deserted roads, no people, just fields, a few cows, catfish ponds reflecting the light. It is quite overwhelming to come back here after an absence and see it and smell the air, falling in love with the place all over again. It's so impossible to photograph well (at least with my meagre level of skill and equipment) but somehow you still feel compelled to try. I was up early this morning to get my old landlord to let me into...