A thief in the night

No matter where you go and how beautiful it is, there always has to be someone who ruins it. This was true of our trip to The Narrows. We hadn't seen anyone all day and when we camped we imagined that our castle extended several kms. Can you imagine our surprise when we discovered that we were robbed whilst we slept?

It is of course ones natural instinct to sleep closely to ones belongings but, on advice from the National Park, we didn't hoard our food in the tent but left it suspended unattended from a tree. In the morning when we went to retrieve our breakfast the evidence of a dirty thief was staring us in our face. The thief had gained access to the suspended bag by chewing through it and had taken every single one of our King Henry's hot and spicy nuts. It hadn't taken our blueberry bagels (which was fortunate as we had intended that they would be our breakfast), it hadn't taken our cereal bars, our fruit or our canyon mix. No, the thief clearly had a liking for hot and spicy nuts. We quickly blamed a cheeky chipmunk, but i was surprised that it had a taste for the nuts as they were in fact quite spicy. Anni confirms, "Yes, I thought that they were hot too, I even had to have a sip of water after eating a small handfull". We half expected to see the creature by the side of the river, clasping its belly regretting eating so many spicy nuts. But no, it had vanished like the rotten thief that it was.

The evidence. I believe this counts as forced entry and would be punished quite harshly if the courts were ever to catch the villain!

Breakfast Candies

We have a pretty boring morning diet. We almost invariably eat muesli with yogurt. Muesli with milk would be fine. Muesli comprises of oats, perhaps another cereal and some dried fruit or nuts. We've been having some problems in the USA. We've searched all over the supermarkets and can't find anything matching this description. We've found things that look like muesli, but on closer inspection (i.e. by looking at the ingredients or by tasting) they are sweet as sin. I think I've gone through my life with breakfast being the most important meal of the day, and have become something of an expert on cereals. However, I'm beaten in the US. They are all bad. We have even tried Kellogs Special K Red Berries. In Europe this is really good. It contains dried strawberries and rasberries that have a sharp kick to them. In the USA they contain sugar coated berries. It seems that the rage is coating the fruit in "evaporated cane juice", I guess that's sugar cane juice and oh, just another way of writing sugar.

Captain Crunch Berries - a kind gift of Tom, Dennis and Mark. The dose of sugar and artificial colourings is enough to give a jolt of hyperactivity in the morning.