The Harley Davidson Special

Someone's idea of heaven: a whole warehouse of Harley Davidson's in Albert Lea, Minnesota. This is just one row.













E hoa ma, it is with deep regret that I must let you know that this will be a short blog, mainly because I am having far too good a time to be bothered keeping y'all up-to-date with my wanderings. I hope you'll be content for now with this little interlude containing pictures of little interest or relevance to anything interesting or relevant, suffice to say that Miranda and I left Chicago on Tuesday and are now hundreds of miles away in bogun-redneck territory. The funny thing is, Americans don't even know what boguns are and it's a difficult concept to translate from NZ to US. And yet this town, where we've decided to spend the night and tomorrow morning, is in fact the original birthplace of the bogun. I can tell by the cars and the fashion sense and the clientele at the bar up the road and the attitude and... Well, I can just tell, and I reckon there's a fantastic anthropological study to be had right here - 'the whence of the bogun'. Anyway, normal blogging transmission shall resume at some point during our brief sojourn in the cowboy west. In the meantime, it's dvd and Bailey's night for the girls, while y'all get this enthralling episode of Tiki Haere.

From what I've seen, American towns and cities do pretty good public sculpture. I liked this roof-top one in Madison, Wisconson.














We lunched at Sioux Falls today, which is a pretty hip town with a whole sculpture walk to take in while shopping. Piki took it upon herself to teach an old dog a new trick while we were there.














Piki was most excited to find that the hotel we stayed at last night was right next door to some kind of Harley Davidson Supercentre, and couldn't wait to strike the pose of Piki the Bikie Chicky. Here she is, looking quite the part with her helmet hair, on a striking white number.













And here she is again doing her handle-bar trick. Can you spot her?













This was my fave - it's such a pretty colour.














We spent Tuesday night in Madison, about three hours drive away from Chicago. It's a very pretty, mid-sized mid-western city, and the capital of Wisconson. Apparently every capital gets a Capitol - building that is. Here's a view of the roof of Madison's - I like the golden lady Liberty.