I’m enjoying Northern California. Immediately after pulling up at the cabin I stepped out of TARS and heard five gunshots in a row a few miles distant.

Yesterday was a very quiet sort of day, where I did almost nothing but stay inside and read. Reading days are one of my very favorite things. I knocked out two and half books, finishing The Dancing Girls (a mystery about a serial killer), Taken to the Grave (a mystery about a spree killer) and The Woman In Cabin 10 (a psychological thriller where a woman doubts her sanity and people get murdered). I recommend the first two, and the third is just fine, except the main character is annoying and the plot starts falling apart.

Still, these were excellent reads for my first full day in the cabin, which, as cabins out in the woods do, have plenty of weird noises and off-putting creaks. Then, around 6pm yesterday (just after it was fully dark) the landline rings. I go to answer it. It’s dead silence. No dial tone. Just someone…listening? I say hello a few times, hang up, shake my head, go back to reading, with the axe at my side.

Maybe an hour later the phone rings AGAIN. I go to answer. A man’s voice says “Terry?” I say no, introduce myself, ask who is calling, he immediately hangs up.

GREAT. Now I’m picturing some vigilante neighbors who have seen the lights and think someone has broken into their neighbor’s cabin and before the night is over I’m going to be hog-tied outside while Faces of Meth #12 screams at me to squeal like a pig.

Nothing happened, though.

Today I went to the Empire Mine State Park, which is a historic gold mine as well as some old-timy rich person buildings. When I was buying my ticket the lady behind the register and apologized and said there was a group of “very loud home-schooled kids” who were running around. I locked eyes with her and told her I was used to it. Sure enough, there was a giant group of the most poorly behaved children I’ve ever seen, running around ignoring their mothers’ instructions, grabbing sticks off the ground and breaking them over old, historical monuments.

The mining exhibits were fairly interesting, but not particularly well-lit, and also behind both bars and chicken wire, so the pictures I attempted came up looking like hot garbage. Eventually I finished up and decided to head back to town. Now as I’ve mentioned before, there’s no cell service except for a few limited locations in Nevada City itself, and that’s spotty. I had downloaded offline maps to be able to navigate, but when I fired it up, it decided to not work.

Can’t be too hard to make it back to town, I thought, so after a few false starts I made it back to town. I spent some time in the historical district (more on that tomorrow), and then started cruising around to try and get a signal to map my way back to the cabin.

No dice.

Fair enough. I started cruising around to different buildings, hoping one of them would have free Wi-Fi I could jump on and reset my Google Maps.

No dice.

After twenty minutes or so, I figured, “Well, it’s only like 10 different turns, you’ve driven this route twice before, you can figure this out, what’s the worst that could happen?” To be honest, I was secretly hoping that I would get lost and something eventful would happen because that makes for better blog updates, but instead, it wasn’t that hard and I remembered how to get back.

Sorry guys.

I write shorts about terrible things that happen in the Bible. Check them out.