Day 34 - Tuesday 8/2/2005 -  Into the desert...

Big Sur is a beautiful way to start the day.  Waking up amid huge redwoods near the Pacific cliffs - you know the day can only go down after that...and it did (but I will go into that later).  We packed up the car, and decided to head inland.  As we started Highway 1, we spent most of our time in the fog, breaking out occasionally to spectacular views.  At one stop we were lucky enough to see Sea Elephants relaxing on the shore.  If this is work for them, you have to wonder what they do on their days off.  By noon we had our share of following large campers on slow roads and turned toward Bakersfield.

The day was hot, and got hotter as we started across the dDesert.  We watched the thermometer in the car top out about 112 degrees, and soar to 122 when we stopped for a few minutes.  We had to make our regular stops at rest areas to look for tarantulas, rattle snakes, and scorpions.  As usual, we came up empty handed.  Throughout our trips, we have yet to see any deadly animals.

We continued on to Barstow, and settled in for the night at a Quality Inn.  The hope was to take some down time to update the Internet site, but instead I ended up working to clear a virus off of my laptop.  Note for anyone using McAfee AV software - there are several things it does not catch, such as the Smitfraud trojan.  I downloaded Norton AV (Symantec) and it was able to find it and clear it.  By then, it had propagated across the registry and into several other hidden area on thye computer, so now I had to remove all of the spy/malware it had loaded.  While I was able to identify and delete the trojan Tuesday night, it would be several days before I was confident that all traces had been removed.