One of the ways in which Margaret Frink connects events throughout her diary is by repeating the amount of time she has spent away from home. The journey she made with her husband for a consuming gold fever was very long and very hard. They withstanded freezing storms, they crossed blazing deserts and swift-moving icy rivers, they endured blinding dust clouds, and suffered fatigue and hunger. She wrote about it to make sense of it all, and one common denominator is, indeed, mentioning the time they journey is lasting.
