Barstow, CA -- one giant truck stop

We are parked in a dirt lot adjacent to the Wal-Mart in Barstow, CA (map). Parked here with us are three other rigs, and about half a dozen semis. Semis are everywhere in Barstow, which also makes it fertile boondocking territory.

We seem to have outrun the humongous storm that is hovering over the northern half of the state, at least for now. I expect it will catch up with us during the night.

I have received several comments posted to the blog by one of our newest readers. A couple concerned the map links, which are having some difficulties, as I wrote a few days ago. I would like to quickly respond to the suggestions thus far:

We do, indeed, post our map link on the Datastorm Users Group web site. If you click the "Where We Are" link on our main menu, it will take you there. However, that link is dynamic, and the map it produces changes every time we move. We want the links we include here in the blog to always point, statically, to the location about which we are blogging in any given post.

In regards to Google Maps (now called "Google Local"), these maps are quite good, but I have yet to figure out how to build a simple link that will show a pin or other symbol at our actual location. Using lat/long coordinates will bring up a map that is more-or-less centered on those coordinates, but it is not obvious from such a map what our actual position is. I have been using MapQuest because that site puts a red star at the indicated position, which remains in place irrespective of zoom level or recentering of the map.

Lastly, it was pointed out that Tioga and George have used MapQuest links on their site, and we could perhaps leverage that fact. However, I don't think George has posted a MapQuest link since this problem surfaced. (Our own MapQuest links also used to work just fine -- something has changed over at MapQuest.) Since George did not post the links directly into his blog (they were on the home page), they are not in his archives to "test" to see if they have the same problem. Since I think his links and mine were the exact same format, I suspect they would have the same issue.

So I am still open to suggestions on how to change my MapQuest links so they load properly on the first click (they do display just fine if you hit "reload" while on the page), or how to get Google to display a locaction icon, or what other map site I could be using that will give us the same functionality without the loading problem. Drop me a note if you have a fix.