I realize that the blog posts so far have been a bit disjointed. There are no daily summaries of the places we visited that day.
I, as Dr Data, assigned myself the task of doing this early on, knowing that K-Os and THE RECORDER are not the linear types of people inclined to do this. But we have been pushing ourselves on this trip so hard that we haven’t allowed ourselves much time to update the blog. Certainly that’s been the case for me.
You’d think that with all the time spent in the car that I’d have time to type out some quick entries on my Blackberry and post it. One frustration I have is that the cell coverage here in South Dakota as far as AT&T has been concerned is spotty. Certainly not the 3G coverage I’m used to in the Big City.
The other reason is that it’s very hard to think straight in the car. I’m not happy with the entries that I type out in the car.
It’s unclear that this pattern will change. K-Os wants to push aggressively for home, and since he’s been doing all the driving thus far, the pace is his to control. And I’m OK with a fast pace, since we can always post from home, although the immediacy will be lost because we’re no longer updating from the road.
The Road to Mt Rushmore, 2010 
Having just driven across country myself, I totally get the inability to document while experiencing and the disjointed nature of the storytelling that results. I say experience and tell the stories when the occur to you — it’s YOUR trip. We’re just voyeurs, enjoying your experiences vicariously. If you fully experience your trip, the stories of it will stay with you long past the time it takes for the print to fade or the 1s and 0s to add up to something…
Plus writing in the car means you miss that wacky statue of a robot tiger on the side of the road in Arizona or the giant Jesus coming out of a lake in Ohio (or whatever the equivalent is in the Badlands — those are things I saw that we passed at 80mph. And the Jesus burned down, struck by lightning, a week after I got back. So glad I didn’t miss that bit of weirdness!)
Setting goals and reaching them can be satisfying, but if your road writing isn’t doing it for you, maybe you should set a different goal. Something like: post twice a day, and don’t worry about the word count. Or you could just take notes now, privately, and later write up something as a short story. Not immediate, like you said, but it would be fun reading for us back at home one day.