I don't usually start writing a post this early (usually...I've only been doing this for three days now), but I'm kind of tired tonight. Partly with too much sun, during the drive, and partly from stress.

We picked up Mia and Sebastian as planned. Well, mainly as planned. Actually Mark and I thought we'd be late, since we both managed to pack all our notebooks and film and books and so on, and neglected to remember his toothbrush and my purse. And then we realized that I didn't have my passport in my purse. It's a real pain to get in and out of Saxesby Airfield without one, it being technically not U.S. soil...which is a whole thing, and I don't want to get into it right now, but the point was Mark and I had to spend twenty-five minutes looking for the passport when we were already late.

But as it turned out, their plane was running late too, so we hung around and ate stale candy canes and wandered through the Christmas trees which were being trimmed. (Why this charter airfield also has a Christmas tree farm on one side is another thing that would take a while to explain. I'll get around to it sometime.) It was very nice. A little bright out, but the pine trees smelled wonderful in the heat...and it wasn't as if there's anything else to do in Banning. It's all fast food and Motel 6s and little Mexican restaurants with signs advertising "camarones y mariscos" despite being worringly far inland and in a desert.

(Although there is a sign I love, as you drive in east on the 10. It's on a billboard put up by the Banning Chamber of Commerce and underneath a cartoon of the state of California and a weird little covered wagon--why?--it says: "Welcome to Banning. We have what you need." Isn't that wonderful and ominous?)

Anyway, after about forty-five minutes the plane arrived, Sebastian and Mia got off, and we all got underway. Of course, Sebastian has no notion of packing light, and there wasn't a ton of room in my trunk...I have an old VW Bug...but we prodded and shifted a bit and Mark held his backpack on his knees.

"Now," I said before we left, "should Sebastian be in shotgun instead of Mark? I mean, I know you two like to hold hands or whatever, but didn't you say you get motion sickness?"

"It's not exactly motion sickness," said Mia.

"I'm just not over-fond of cars. I thought at the first I should never find myself accustomed to being hurtled along at such a speed, and with so little between myself and death, but use has bred some easiness. I'll be fine."

And he was, for a ways, till we got near Cabazon, and he started sitting up very straight and looking directly ahead of him and all the other things you do when you're trying not to toss your cookies. It was good timing, though, because we got to stop at the dinosaurs.

We went into the diner, first. I remembered that they had good pie, having been there with my father as a kid. It wasn't very busy this afternoon. We sat down in a booth and the waitress looked around after a minute and said "Oh. You want coffee."

None of us did. This seemed to be the wrong answer, because she compressed her lips, and when Sebastian asked for hot chocolate she gave him a funny look. (Granted, he is about 25 and a guy, but they drank it sort of medicinally back in his day) Mia didn't want anything; I got a fat slice of coconut-cream pie, and Mark, once he noticed they were on the menu, had to have a buffalo burger. The waitress asked him twice if he wanted onion, and then forgot it when she brought the order.

Mia and I exchanged a look. Mark seemed oblivious (he was staring at the glass case of silver belt buckles for sale), and I thought it would never occur to Sebastian that an underling might give intentionally bad service, but she and I were steamed. And when Mia asked for a piece of pie to go--it was good pie--the waitress repeated "to go" and then brought it over on a plate. There being nothing else to do, we asked for a box, left a decent tip by way of heaping coals of fire on her head, and went outside.

There were a fair number of kids running around the dinosaurs, and parents with cameras backing up to try to get the big EAT sign over the diner in the same frame as the tyrannosaurus rex. There are metal stairs with railings that go up into the dinos, so you can look out and down, and there's a gift shop near the brontosaurus that sells "fossils" and informational booklets and so on. As I was sitting on the brontosaurus's tail, Sebastian came over and watched with me as Mark took Mia's picture in various silly poses.

"I collect I ought not to have refused the coffee."

I looked up in some surprise. "I thought you didn't notice. I think probably that waitress is just used to truck drivers and is...well, a little hostile."

"Because we look rich?"

I nodded. "Ha," I added, in reference to Mark and myself.

"Mia thought it was because we're St. Ias."

"What?" The St. Ia family isn't exactly beloved in its native Cornwall, having spent much of the last five centuries in piracy, smuggling, and god-knows-what. Mia spent a lot of her childhood at the old Abbey manor, and, like all the St. Ia kids, had to deal with a certain amount of crap from the people in the village below. But: "How could that waitress possibly know that?"

"She could not. But Mia has a great deal of sensibility on that point."

"Huh," I said. My opinion of Sebastian's own sense was improving.

When we got back in the car this time, he was in front. This seemed to work better, and I was just reflecting on what a euphonious place-name "Indian Wells" is, when Sebastian started having some kind of panic attack.

"What's wrong?"

"Sweetheart? What is it?"

He was breathing hard, staring out the window with wide glassy eyes. There was nothing for him to be looking at, just the desert and the billboards and, as the road went up a bit, the big white windmills that cover the hills to the left and the plain to the right. We were in the middle-left lane, so I couldn't pull over, and I put my hand out to his neck to try to calm him...

...and found myself in the landscape of a nightmare. Dry, alien hills shone with merciless light and heat, which somehow did not touch me. There was writing floating all around, in different sizes and shapes and lurid colors, meaningless collections of words that nonetheless demanded attention. In the distance, but bearing closer, skeleton shapes twirled their enormous arms. And all around me was the keening wail of incomprehensible music...

I took my hand away and reached forward, shakily, to turn off the CD player. "I don't think the Radiohead is helping." With extreme, mostly unnecessary care, I managed to shift three lanes to the right, pulled over on the shoulder, and cursed softly under my breath. If I was going to keep getting telepathic flashes like that, I was damn well going to stop meditating.

After that, I let Mark drive the last twenty miles or so to Palm Springs. Sebastian and I sat in the back and, as we started feeling better, made weak Don Quixote jokes. But I'm still feeling a bit wrung out, and my eyes are starting to burn, so I'd better leave off for tonight. It's a very nice hotel, and Mark has already stolen one of the pillows from my bed.