Dirt and Desert. Its everywhere here. The dirt, dust, and unction all seem to combine to leave a film on your skin. Nothing seems to grow but tumbleweed and some very twisted palms.

There are quite a few houses being built out here - but few yards - stones or dirt generally. The orange moon rises and sets on a martian landscape.

Testing continued all day at our residential site, having commenced around 8 AM. We took a break to swing by Best Buy for parts, and the Victorville base to pick up our credentials and scope our pit - which was eerily vacant.

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Other pits were buzzing with excitement, tents, cars, computers, scientists. Ours was a parking lot. DARPA officials seemed to be getting nervous. We received a call from our DARPA "liasion" Todd Hughes - he seemed to be probing whether we would actually be showing up.

But over at the J.D. Pierce site, things were abuzz. Paul refined curb detection - he asked me to do some trig calculations - I ciphered on it and said -"Didn't I do this for you two years ago for the desert challenge?". He said "Yeah, but I wanted to see if you'd get the same answer". All the student mad scientists were busy in the RV, programming, debugging, supporting.

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We started rolling towards the Victorville base around 4 - cutting it close for the 5 o'clock deadline - and Tommy needed gas - it got a little tense with the lines for gas and our need to arrive:

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In the end we made it on time and also for the 5:00 opening brief. This was the highlight:

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As the martian moon rose for the second time, we took the liberty of "checking our robot out" with DARPA so we could continue with our offsite testing.