Barked at by Dogs and Shat at by Cows

Basically, the plan started out with a simple interactive map. It would show the route we travelled and if you clicked on bits of it, a picture or a brief description of whatever had happened to us there might come up.

But then I thought, what if I wrote a little Java program that would draw a line over the map like in Casablanca "And so the refugees would follow a torturous route... ...blah blah blah... ...Lisbon... ...blah blah blah..."

This still didn't do much towards capturing the atmosphere of the trip.

Eventually, the grand vision I had called for there being nothing on the page but a button. Once you clicked it this amazing program would take over the computer and the screen would morph outwards and turn into two sharpened glass probes which would thrust themselves into your brain. Then, all my memories and impressions of the trip would play through your head in real time. You would feel the rain and the cold and the wind. Electrical impulses would actually fire the muscles in your thighs over and over again until they were rubbery and burning like flaming jello. Dogs would bark. Cows would shit. Sheep would stare blankly at you.

All of this was well and fine, but implementing it proved to be a bit of a problem. The glass probes had to be very accurate when they thrust through the skull or they could do considerable damage. I found that some subjects became startled when the program began to run with grave results. In addition, a program like this has to be platform-independent which means it will run equally well on any type of computer. Well, despite what Sun microsystems may tell you, this is still a bit of a pipe dream. The sunny bits came out beautifully on a Macintosh, but on a Windows box everything looked a bit gray and dreary. Processor speed was also a bit of an issue. The slower the processor, the slower the thrusting of the probes and the more likely the subject would flinch in some fatal manner before his or her thought processes were taken over by the machine.

The bottom line is that it still needs a bit of work. I've put the basic map up for now in the map section of the Yanda Time site (/Yanda).I will let you know when I have it up and running. Remember to keep very very still when you are looking at it.

The trip was a short one. We left on New Year's day. Yes, we were hungover. We had joined a friend's family for New Year's Eve at a pub called the Dutton Arms where we ate and drank way too much. This may have been a mistake.

The weather for most of the trip wasn't bad considering it was the middle of winter in Northern England. It was a bit drizzly New Year's day, but not too bad and we travelled by circuitous route to the town of Kirkby-Lonsdale where we stayed at the Royal Hotel.

Along the way, we stopped in at the Punchbowl Inn near Burton-on-Lonsdale where we met a woman whose aunt (or great-aunt, or mother, or possibly her great-aunt's mother's dog) had walked all the way across Canada at the turn of the century. "They were farmers," she said by way of explanation. I just nodded. I felt a bit out of place because I was the only one in the pub without at least one dog at my feet.

A man with two dogs at his feet warned me not to drink at the Royal Hotel. "It's a fine place to stay, but if you want to have a pint you should go down to the Sun."

When we were checking into the Royal, my reaction to this advice was that the Royal was just too fun for the old-fogey dog-owner guy. There were two rugby teams carousing in the pub mixed in with a number of imitation spice girls. This was at four in the afternoon. Later, I discovered it was quite the opposite. The pub at the Royal was the tamest in town. The Sun was packed wall to wall with mayhem and frivolity. It was all too much for our poisoned brains and overworked bodies. After wandering about the town for a bit we ended up back at the Royal for a quiet drink in the library over a copy of "Ten Years of Short Stories from the New Yorker: 1950 to 1960". And then we went to bed.

The Royal is a nice-looking old hotel. Our bed, however, had been designed around the premise of the crevasse and sloped sharply from both sides to the middle. It is a good thing we are still technically newlyweds. There was also a TV, on which we listened to part of Airplane II before we went to sleep. Reception wasn't very good in our room. The sound came in fine, but there was no picture. We gave up after a few minutes and rappelled down into the center of the bed to sleep.