USA Today!

Short Verion:
Kill, drive, US news

Long Version:
We saw our first Nonu-bird* just before we left Abalone Point. It flitted around the front of the stationary Reaper - possibly checking out the insectoid carcass collection - then flew off. Saw our second not long after we got underway. It too flitted around the front of the Reaper, but failed to account for the fact that we were doing 55mph, and ended up in no fit state to fly off. Sorry, Nonu-bird! We saw a piano in a field, a drive-thru tree**, a tree-house and a one-tree house. We saw a lot of Bigfoot stuff (Hi Sarah and her Yeti and their Yetilet!) and a lot of police cars.

We'd cut inland, and the sun was shining on steep, forest-clad hillsides, lovely rivers, and the occasional pretty lake. We stopped at Garbadale for caffeine and internets, and ended up with delicious foods as well. I read USA Today, which is a pretty strange publication. Highlights included:
- An article about pianos on the streets of New York, labelled "Play me, I'm yours." Apparently the same thing has been done in a number of cities around the world. And, maybe, in a field in northern California.
- A picture of Chris Killen from the NZ football team swapping his shirt with Daniele de Rossi of Italia after their World Cup match (USA Today, July 2 edition, p11C in case Mrs Killen is doing a scrapbook)
- A letter to the editor of USA Today, bemoaning the state of the USA today, which stated that, among other things, "...we should instil better dietary habits in our youth" - I don't disagree, but in the context of the descent into barbarism of a once-great, leader-among-nations country, it's not really what I expected to see as the culminatory closing statement.
For some reason, there were a lot of counter-culture kids in Garbadale, which otherwise seemed like a very nice, fairly standard northern California town. They did have a pickup truck parked inside the Visitor Info office though.

And then we left town on a narrow road which became smaller and smaller as we went west, until at the top of a steep ridge we turned off the now one-lane paved road onto a one-lane dirt track. We wound our way along the ridgeline for several miles, and eventually reached what had been our destination for a couple of days now: the Tolkan Campground. Which turned out to be even better than we'd hoped, with only the lack of a river or an ocean to frolic in marring the perfection. The location right on the mountain-bike trail was perfect, as was the low occupancy rate and the nature and privacy of the individual sites.

We arrived early afternoon, set up camp, and set off to ride in our new backyard, on the Paradise Royale Mountain Bike Trail.

* = Feathery equivalent of the Nonu-fish from Bahia Concepcion; i.e. black and yellow and looking very much like they had eyeliner on.

** = We didn't actually SEE the drive-thru tree, as there was a $5 admission fee, and we wouldn't have been able to drive the far-too-enormous Reaper through the drive-thru tree. But we saw some wonderfully-executed artists' impressions.