El Nido, California

A small rural town toward the Southern edge of Merced County, California, and 11 miles south of the city of Merced along Highway 59, El Nido is said to have been named by the Mexican bandit, Juoquin Murieda. The town's principle features include a post office next door to a building that hosts a tavern and general store. Several hundred feet further down Highway 59, there exists a Volunteer Fire Station, across the street from another structure which once housed a school, but now houses a library and occasionally, some manner of community celebration. A short distance from the library, also on El Nido Road, exists El Nido Elementary School, which teaches grades K though 8. Graduates from this school will then attend either Dos Palos High School in Dos Palos, CA or Golden Valley High School in Merced, CA, largely dependent upon the preference of their parents, though graduates from El Nido Elementary may be apt to discover that the names of friends who went to the other high school are being called during role call in their classes for the first few weeks of their freshman year, until the two schools have sorted out properly, just who has gone where.

The youth of El Nido often take great pride in having grown up there, by the time they get into High School. This may be partly due to the comradery of having participated in a great deal of activities with potentially lethal or at least unpleasent consequences should they fail (ie, playing "Chicken" on bicycles against semi-trucks, or jumping over canals at dairies full of cow manure), and after all of that, having survived to physical maturity (though that is not to implicate mental maturity). Many of these youths also take it upon themselves to assume that after such a rigorous time growing up, they must therefore be somehow tougher than these soft "city kids" who don't have an eleven mile walk to the nearest McDonald's.

This article has been begun by Garrett Courtney, who indeed did grow up in El Nido, California, and indeed does take great pride in that.