We go to Payette to see Sean

To the west of Boise towards Oregon, the broad, irrigation-green valley lands are bordered by brown badland hills, a dramatic contrast on a hot sunny day. We drove out to Payette, Mike and Rosemary and I, along hayfields and cow pastures, to see Sean, Mike's son and my cousin. We stopped at a pull-out to read two plaques, one commemorating the site of a long gone fort built during the Nez Perce War in 1877, one remembering nineteen men who died nearby in a military air transport crash in 1958. In the shade you could smell honeysuckle, but in the ninety degree sun you just smelled dust and heat.

On the drive I learned that Rosie, Grandpa's girlfriend, had made a living for most of her life as a bartender in various Boise establishments, in particular the HiHo Club downtown. All over Boise people will still recognize her from those days, especially cowboy musicians, who often played at the HiHo. Boxcar Willie played a number of gigs at the club too, back in the sixties and seventies; taking a shine to Rosie he wrote a song about her, called "Rose."

In Payette we picked up Sean at his mother's house. He's a dark-haired young man, black Irish, with a small black chin beard and a heavy scruff after a few days without shaving. He wore a black t-shirt with an image of a skeleton riding an old-fashioned bicycle, the word "Cycledelia" written above. And black pants just below the knee and big skater shoes. He talks slow and smiles big, and whenever I see him I want to put my arm around his shoulders. He's working as a cook at two cafes, the Apple Bin in Fruitland for breakfast and lunch, DJs in Ontario for dinner. We talked about the difficulty of saving the yolk when frying eggs.

In Ontario we had a late lunch at Portillos Mexican Family Restaurant. The plates were massive, nearly the size of trash can lids. Rosemary had one of the combination options: Hagrid-sized chalupa, tamale and taco, rice and beans; we could have puut the plate in the middle of the table to share and it would have been enough. I don't know the explanation for such gargantuan portions; maybe it's what the local diners expect. I had a couple fat cheese enchiladas. Sean had carne asada tacos, new to him, and he didn't like the cilantro. Mike had arroz con pollo, and later back in the car said he found a hair in his food. Rosemary asked what color, and he said white. "That was your hair," she said.

Afterwards we dropped Sean off at DJs, next to the Rodeway Inn beside the interstate. He would be cooking till eleven. We drove back to Boise, stopping briefly at a wildlife refuge on the Boise River.

At the house, Rosie was sitting on the couch watching the U.S. Open. "Your grandfather's in the bedroom," she said, laughing. "I couldn't get him to watch golf with me. He's back there with his Lawrence Welk." (I didn't need to be told; the set was blasting, as it always is when he's watching.) He's been a Welk fan for many decades. When I visited as a kid sometimes I'd watch with him and Grandma, but more often I'd escape outside or to another room.

I sat down at the dining room table. Rosie provided a running commentary on the drives and putts of the golfers. When Tiger Woods made an unlikely chip-in from the rough, she said, "did you see that?" I did. Together we watched the replay over and over. After the shot Woods had laughed and looked embarrassed.

This was my last day in Boise. Everyone said they wished I could stay longer, as they do everytime I visit. But I left the next morning, headed south towards Nevada.

Alix goes home, Grandpa tells a story

Alix left yesterday. At the airport she cried just before we parted at the security gate. She said, "I wasn't going to cry." I choked up afterwards, as I watched her pass through security, first taking off her bracelet and earrings then wrestling her full backpack and bag onto the conveyor. Ever since that time in Alaska, about ten years ago, when I broke down and sobbed before putting her on a plane, I've tried to be more composed at airports. "I thought I was going to die," she said afterwards.

Alix and I traveled well together, and I'm going to miss her company. Plus, she took the Harry Potter cds with her, the last book, after having hooked me in.

In the early afternoon before she left, she and Rosemary went off to Panda Express and brought back several styrofoam containers of food. Afterwards I got Grandpa's permission to break out the family photographs. For a man so meticulously organized in most parts of his life, it's surprising that the photos are uncataloged, mixed up in numerous cardboard boxes and two ancient suitcases. I couldn't find the sixties era, but the thirties and forties and fifties were well represented. Alix said, "why didn't we do this before? I could spend all day looking at these pictures."

In the evening, after calling Alix during her layover in Denver, I sat on the back patio with Grandpa and Mike, and Grandpa soon settled into a storytelling rhythm, moving from one Nebraska childhood story to another, many of them revolving around his father. One I hadn't heard before. It's not so much about his father, though he plays a small part. In the late 1920s and early 1930s his father for a time worked as a truck driver, driving loads between Omaha or Grand Island and small towns like Spalding and Greeley, hauling farm equipment, groceries, whatever people needed. He often took Grandpa, his oldest child, along with him, partly for company, partly because he couldn't read and Grandpa could help with the invoices and paperwork. I'll try to let Grandpa tell of one particular trip to Grand Island:

We got down there in the afternoon and headed to the warehouse part of town. I had a friend with me, this kid I'd been chumming around with that summer, and Dad let him come along. He was a few years older than me, fifteen, I think; I was twelve.

Well, after waiting around for awhile, I asked Dad if we could go off on our own. He said, "that'd be ok, I suppose. But don't be gone too long."

So off we went, poking around here and there, doing this and that, I don't know what, just what boys do, I suppose. Eventually I noticed that it was getting dark, and I said we should go back. I was a little worried that dad would have something to say to me, but when we got back he wasn't there. We looked all around, but we couldn't find him. Turns out he was out looking around town for us.

Anyway, we decided that we'd go off to this park we knew about, and maybe we'd spend the night there and then come back in the morning and find Dad. So off we go, and pretty soon we get to the park. It's a big park, lots of trees, some woods, but we find a bench out in the middle, in the open and set down. We figured we could take turns laying out and sleeping on the bench.

But after awhile here come this police car, shining a spotlight out into the park. We get down low so he won't see us. He comes by a couple times, then gets on his loud speaker. "Alright," he says, "all you fellas in there I want you to come out and line up here on the street. I don't want any trouble, I just want you to do it now."

Well, after just a minute here come all these men out of the trees, like bedbugs when the light comes on. We hadn't seen one of them, didn't know anyone else was in the park, but pretty soon there was fifty of us standing out in the street beside the police car. The officer said, "ok, all of you start walking down this way, and when you get to that corner take a right and keep going." So we started off, and the polce car drove behind us slow, its headlights on us.

When we come to the police station they had us line up and go through a sort of receiving procedure. When you got up to the desk another officer said, "empty your pockets," and he'd put all your things in a sack and write out your name on it. I guess they didn't want any knives in there or something like that.

Well, then they had us all go into this big room, not a thing in it, not a chair or a bench, with a bathroom at the far end. We, my friend and I was the only kids, the rest was all men, in their twenties and older. I don't know why they put us in there too, but they didn't say anything about us being kids.

I remember there was this one guy, pretty well dressed, which made him stand out in that crowd. He took his pants off and laid them out carefully on the floor and then walked up and down on them to get a good crease. The damnedest thing.

They'd left the door to the room open, a big iron gate, but around three in the morning someone came along and closed it, and then everything felt entirely different.

In the morning they brought us each a piece of bread and a bowl of oatmeal, but no milk or anything to go in it. Then they took us outside and the head police officer spoke and said, "alright, all of you go on down this street here, then go left on Dodge, then take the next right and keep on going out of town. I don't want to see any of you here again, and I mean it."

Well, we all set off together, a big ragged bunch, and pretty soon me and my friend we cut away on our own and headed for the warehouses. Dad was there, and I thought he was going to give us hell, but when he heard what had happened he was what you might call lenient....

Grandpa laughed, then teared up, as he often does when speaking of his father, a man dead for seventy years.

Grandpa and Rosie

Alix slept in the living room, I got the spare bedroom. When I got up at seven she retreated to the bedroom, not reappearing till the morning was well-advanced. Rosie bunked with Grandpa--their usual arrangement, I assume, but she seemed a little sheepish about sleeping over, what with the young people in the house.

In the morning, before Grandpa appeared, Rosie told me that they were getting married, "in October or November." Janie had already broken the story the day before, almost the first bit of family news she'd shared. "Your grandfather's getting married," she'd said. "Again." But she and everyone else seems to approve of Rosie, mostly, and consider her a great improvement on the previous wife, Audrey, who lasted only a couple years and who Janie calls "a golddigger." After Audrey Grandpa had said he would never marry again, but as a good Catholic he's apparently uncomfortable with unauthorized cohabitation.

Rosie told me she had become a Catholic herself, since meeting Grandpa. She's 78 to his 88, a little sharper and quicker, at least physically, than him, but he's certainly in charge. They met dancing, which they continue to do three nights a week, at the Eagles lodge. The women far outnumber the men at these events, and Grandpa had told me before that he was kept busy on the dance floor trying to service them all.

With some emotion, Rosie told me that Grandpa was the nicest man she'd ever met. "He's so considerate, always looking out for me." I'd call it controlling, but she takes it as affection and why not. She looks out for him too, cooks for him, puts her hands on him a lot, loudly repeats things that people say since Grandpa can't hear well. And she listens to him with great attention, laughing Ed McMahon-style at each pause. "I just love to hear his stories," she told me.

Grandpa and Rosie went off to the doctor in the morning, so Rosie could get shots to ease back pain that has cropped up this week (interrupting their dance schedule). She's hoping to improve before driving up to Lewiston later this week for an Eagles event. State branches of the Ladies Auxiliary the Eagles meet annually to compete in performing "The Ritual"--the prescribed agenda and language of an Auxiliary meeting, with parts taken by the President, Vice-president, etc, four or five positions all together, including Chaplain (Rosie's part). In the competition the woman are judged on how well they remember and act out "The Ritual." During the day Rosie occasionally studied from a small white book, working on her part.

Alix and I soon went off with my uncle Mike and Aunt Rosemary, and Rosemary's two-year-old granddaughter, Rylee, to tour Boise. We drove around the older, leafier parts of town, out to Lucky Peak Reservoir, back to Ann Morrison Park in town for a walk among trout ponds. We ate lunch at a Basque restaurant downtown, Bar Gernika. I had tortilla de patatas and croquetas, Alix a lamb grinder.

In the afternoon, Rylee's mother, my cousin Kristen came over, and more visiting was accomplished, mostly sitting on the back patio looking out over the backyard. Grandpa picked dead leaves off the plants and flowers scattered in beds around the yard, then watered. The rest of us drank beer or soda and watched him. The sun slowly sank towards the western horizon. I got up and twirled Rylee in the grass, until her laughter turned to mews of fear, then I stopped and she staggered about dizzily. Then she said, "do it again."

Late, after everyone had gone home, Alix had me take her out to look for something to eat. Periodically she requires warm food cooked by strangers. Most everything was closed, so we settled on Sonic, mostly because Alix said she liked their commercials and had never eaten there. She ordered chicken fingers but didn't finish them. I had a vanilla milk shake and left not a drop.

At Chuck and Janie's in New Plymouth

Late in the morning Alix and I drove an hour west to New Plymouth, down the short main street and out past town a mile to the Park View Cemetery. A funeral had just finished and a long line of cars and pick-ups was coming out.

I first came to New Plymouth when I was thirteen or fourteen and stayed with my great-grandmother, Grandma Liz, in her small green house with her small, gray husband, Shorty. I ran around town with cousins, a suburban youth surprised by and smitten with a small town filled with people to whom I was related. I took Alix to Grandma Liz's headstone first. We visited my grandmother Barbara, too, and her son, my uncle Kelly. Alix said, "it's so sad," and it was, but somehow comforting too, to have them marked down there in the grass.

We drove past Grandma Liz's old house, then Chuck and Janie's (a great uncle and aunt) two blocks away. I could see Janie through one of the front windows standing at the kitchen sink and decided we'd go ahead and drop in unannounced. When she came to the door she didn't recognize me for a moment, but then she did and opened the screen door and told us to come on in.

"Sit down, sit down," she said. "Can I get you kids something to drink? I'd offer you lunch but we just finished and there's nothing left." She laughed apologetically. Later she gave us ice cream cones from the freezer. Alix and I did sit down on a small couch in the small living room, after shaking hands with Chuck, who sat limply in the corner of another couch opposite. A clear plastic tube snaked from a humming oxygen machine in the corner to Chuck's nostrils. He was pale, his eyes red and red-rimmed, but his voice was strong. He's had heart trouble and just recently was diagnosed with leukemia. Blood transfusions every couple months apparently keep him going. He's 86, Janie 81.

We spent most of the afternoon at the house, visiting. After awhile Janie called Jeanette and Nig, another octogenarian aunt and uncle pair, and fifteen minutes later they were over, despite Jeanette's recent broken hip. "The doctor wants me to use a walker," she confided, "but a cane works good enough." She seemed not the least discouraged by her injury, though a little surprised. She's a sharp, active woman, white-haired but seemingly little affected by age.

Janie too. She's slight, weighing less than a hundred pounds, irreverent and skeptical, something of a smart-ass. When the subject of camping came up, in connection with our journey out from Minnesota, she said she did not like to camp. "That's over for us, thank God. There was all that getting ready and the packing up, which takes forever, and then when we'd get there he"--she jerked a thumb at Chuck, saying "he" with affectionate disdain--"he and the other guys would just go off fishing, while I had to do all the setting up. Then he comes back hungry and I gotta cook. And while I clean up he and his buddies sit and drink beer and play cards and tell lies." She laughed. Chuck said, "I always liked camping."

Just the day before one of Chuck and Janie's grandkids had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. "They both have wierd names," Janie said, shaking her head ruefully, "and I can't keep them in my head." She paused. "The girl's is Nev something--it's heaven spelled backwards." I said I'd read that Nevaeh was becoming quite popular. "But how do you pronounce that?" she said. We tried several variations but were unable to settle on a consensus.

The boy's name she couldn't remember at all. She pulled on her ear and thought for a moment. "It's in that wooden Indian song," she said. It took me a minute, but the clue was sufficient. "Elijah?" I asked. "Yeah," she said,laughing, "that's it. Where do they come up with these names?" Janie's kids are Rick and Sue and Chuckie.

Janie warmed up two big muffins and sliced them into strips and we sat at the dining room table drinking soda. Nig told us that he had both new eyes and new knees. He's a tall man, well-groomed. Alix liked his subtle pompadour, a gray wave rising gently from his temple. He said he'd now been retired for twenty years--he'd been a high school prinicpal, a school supertintendent--and that retirement had been a whole other busy career.

Somehow the subject turned to smoking, and it came out they had all been smokers for most of their lives. Janie still is. She didn't start until she was thirty-five, though. "I tried before," she said, "but I just didn't like it. When I was in nursing school there was a smoking room and all the girls smoked--it was like they wanted us to--but I just couldn't stand it. Later, though, after I had kids, I took it up." Alix said that she smoked and Janie immediately brightened. "Let's go back on the patio," she said. Outside Janie smoked four cigarettes to Alix's one. I took a picture of them together, each smiling and holding a cigarette up to the side.

Soon after Alix and I said our good-byes and headed back down to Boise. At my grandfather's house, his girlfriend Rosie opened the door and invited us in. Their new dog, a bichon frise named Lacey barked at us, until her bark collar zapped her, and then she yelped as if someone had stepped on her. After the greetings we all sat down at the dining room table and began a new round of visiting.

This time Alix survives Craters of the Moon

This morning we smell like day-old smoke. Last night Alix made us tomato sandwiches for dinner, then opened small plastic containers of potato and macaroni salad bought at a fancy grocery store in Bozeman. We sat in the dark by the fire, a little cold nonetheless; the temperature had dropped down into the thirties.

We set off early again, and Alix barely stirred in her bed. She had closed the back curtains so I used the side mirrors to back out of our campsite.

I woke her a couple hours later to see Mesa Falls, a 114 foot cascade south of Yellowstone. We had earlier passed through West Yellowstone, the most touristy town in the western U.S.--dozens of motels and souvenir shops, gear stores and outfitters, helicopter rides, even an IMAX theater where one can have the Yellowstone "experience" before actually visiting the park. A visit that did not seem to me at all alluring, considering the hordes funneling into the adjacent park.

We walked down a trail to a catwalk perched above the brink of the wide falls. Mist floated up and enveloped us; the air smelled of crushed water. Alix said, "do I look like an idiot?" My down jacket, which she was wearing, was long enough to cover her skirt, making it appear as if she was wearing just leggings. No, I said, the outfit, along with her Robin Hood boots, made her look as if she was on a fashion shoot. She vogued briefly. "What about me?" I said. "This looks ok, doesn't it?" I gestured at the black long underwear I wore beneath my shorts, a look I considered hikerboy chic. She shook her head and grimaced. "No."

By lunch time we had reached the moderately large town of Idaho Falls, where we ate downtown at the Snakebite Restaurant. The mood and food was hipster bourgeoise, apparently a growing demographic in some parts of Idaho, having drifted down from Montana (on the other hand I just read a newspaper story about the growing "Open Carry" movement in these parts. Apparently it's not illegal to wear a gun on your hip, and, according to one interviewee, preferable on hot days to the shoulder holster; a sweaty gun pressing against the underarm can be unpleasant.)

After lunch we walked to two thrift stores, first the Idaho Youth Ranch, then Deseret Industries (the latter a Mormon concern). The Ranch was a bust, but at DI Alix found a a green pair of cowboy boots and a grey hoody appliqued with the single word "Mom." Still, she didn't like the place. When she was trying on the boots, a young man had sidled up and said, "those look great on you." That didn't sound too awful to me. "Yeah," Alix said, "but he held eye contact just a little too long. Like what am I going to say, 'thanks, let's go somehwere and make out'?"

From Idaho Falls we headed west on U.S. 20, out across a vast sagebrush flat, just south of snowy mountains rising up to our right. The sky was blue blue, dotted with puffy clouds, Simpsons' clouds Alix called them. But the temperature was only in the lower fifties and a fierce wind was blowing. At a lonely rest stop a weather station gauged the wind at thirty to forty miles per hour, with gusts to fifty. It was cold.

We passed through Arco, the first town in the U.S. powered by nuclear energy, and soon after stopped at Craters of the Moon National Monument. We had visited the park together before, when Alix was eight; on a walk she had fallen and cut her hand badly on the sharp black lava rock. When I couldn't stop the bleeding we had to turn to a ranger at the nearby visitor's center. I'd wrestled her into temporary submission while he cleaned bits of black grit from the deep cut. On this day we went on a careful walk a short distance into a lava field. I took a picture of Alix holding up her hand to display her scar.

We continued westwards, from sagebrush into dry foothills, coming after a couple hours to the town of Mountain Home. We had decided to seek a motel, so Alix could do her hair and I could shave, prior to meeting relatives the next day. However, there was some difficulty about choosing a motel. Alix prefers something reassuringly familiar, such as Sleep Inn, while I am drawn to the older, independent and much cheaper sort of motel. Unfortunately, Alix associates this latter type with the Bates Motel and sordid crimes. "Too creepy" was her repeated assessment.

We thought to maybe please us both with a Super 8 or a Motel 6, but that meant driving another hour to Boise, which we did, and where we indeed found a room at a Motel 6. Later, though, after we'd eaten Taco Bell, and Alix had discovered she had no shampoo and conditioner, and nothing good was on television, and we had listened for several hours to loud Middle Eastern music coming from the room below, she said, "this was a mistake."

Motels do sing siren songs of hot water and HBO, but camping is actually more satisfying.

We liked Billings

In western North Dakota in mid-June the night begins to give way to the day about 4:30 am, even on overcast mornings. I woke with the first light, fought with it for a time, then finally gave up and descended to the cabin and quietly lowered the top.

We set out at six, Alix still unconscious in her bed, where she stayed most of the morning. When she finally rose at ten, she said that the previous four hours on the road had been "a perfect sleep."

While she slept I listened to am radio, first to a station out of Dickinson, North Dakota. Local news, corn and cattle prices, and other bits were occasionally interrupted with single songs, like Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and "Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World." The DJ, a man named Jefferson Clark, personalized the names of singers, referring to them as "Bobby Dylan" and "Johnny Denver." He read a long list of events that had happened on the current date, starting back in the 1940s and moving towards the present. In 1969 Warren Burger was confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; in 1994 Left-Eye, in a fit of jealous rage, had burned down the mansion of boyfriend Andre Rison, then a wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons.

After the AP news came "The Files of Jefferson Clark," apparently a daily feature. This morning's topic was how Jefferson carries his money. He likes to use cash and usually has between $40 and $150 in his wallet. As for the wallet, he doesn't like how "a big wad feels on my hind-end." Plus, the bulge does not flatter his figure, as he is "built low to the ground." He prefers to carry his wallet in a front pants pocket. From his own practices he turned to women and their crazy habits, in particular the mystery of the purse. Apparently women just toss their money into their giant purses with everything else they own. Jefferson told about his mother's huge purse and how when a child he had once weighed it out of curiosity.

At a commercial break, in a campaign ad, Senator Max Baucus bragged about his work on the Farm Bill.

I found another station, this one out of Terry, Montana, and listened for a time to the call-ins to The Trading Post. Someone wanted a bumper for a 1973 Chevelle. Good luck, I thought. Someone else was selling twelve cockatiels. An elderly man, who spoke slowly and with a voicebox mic, had several items to offer for sale, including a dresser and mirror and "almost new cover-alls about my size."

The sky cleared mid-morning as we followed the Yellowstone River across eastern Montana, beautiful beautiful country. Cottonwoods lined the river, and an occasional ranch house and barn stood in the bottomlands surrounded by hayfields. On either side of the river valley low bluffs rose; beyond them the plains rolled away green with the recent rains. I got off the interstate for stretches and followed two-lane roads closer to the river.

We reached Billings at lunch time, perfect timing. Alix directed me downtown to Sarah's, a Mexican food place where you order in the back at a window to the kitchen. An old woman took our orders and shouted them to the cook. I had a bean and cheese burrito, Alix taquitos with guacamole. Very good.

A few blocks away we discovered one of the great thrift stores of North America, a huge St. Paul de Vincents. Downstairs a vast array of furniture and appliances, upstairs clothes, household items, and sundries. Alix found a Nike track jacket, a pair of hot pink slip-on flats, "a ridiculous green 80s belt with a huge gold hook clasp," a second belt, and four pairs of earrings--for $8. Woo hoo! As we took to the highway again, Alix basked in that particular high that comes from thrift store success.

We stopped later at another thrift store in Livingstone, but it fell short of the high standard set by in Billings. Alix did get a purple scarf, as her hair--that is, what to do with it--is starting to become an issue.

We paused in Bozeman in the rain before turning south off the interstate to follow the Gallatin River down towards Big Sky. The road travels through a lovely, narrow valley, heavily wooded, and repeatedly crosses the fast stream. We spotted kayakers shooting down the rapids.

We stopped for firewood before settling in for the night at a secluded national forest campground, Swan Creek, on a wooded site on the tiny, noisy stream.

Frontier village people

In Jamestown, North Dakota, yesterday we were lured from the highway by the worldest's largest buffalo. Beneath its massive head, we took turns posing for the same photographs taken by tens of thousands since the creature first went on display in 1959.

The buffalo stood on a cement apron on the edge of Frontier Village. Small wooden buildings, fronted with a boardwalk, lined the town's single street. We stepped first into the insurance office and I leaned over a rail and pretended to operate an old timey adding machine. Hilarious.

In the jail we briefly occupied one of the two cells, acting out another set piece of tourist theater. In the Dentist's office a man mannikin stood with drill in hand looming over a seated woman mannikin, who looked up at him in blank-faced terror. The heavy make-up around her eyes gave her a haunted look. Her wig and long white gloves suggested that maybe she was a recluse forced out into society by a toothache. A sign on the wall said that the dentists of Jamestown sponsored the exhibit "in memory of our pioneer dentists."

In the saloon two mannikins, a floozy and a bartender, stood behind the bar. The former had bright red hair similar to Alix's and wore a black boa around her neck. The bartender was shorter and clearly had started life as a woman. He was wigless but wore a bowler hat, as well as a vest and bow tie; his thick black walrus moustache could not hide the delicate features of a pretty woman mannikin. I went behind the bar and stood between them for a picture.

At the other end of the bar mounted up on the wall was the large head of a deer, which unlike the employees seemed to be period specific. Much of the fur had fallen away from the head, and its lips had pulled back revealing its teeth and giving it a menacing, rabidic expression.

Across the street from the saloon we entered Louis L'Amour's Writing Shack. On a wall, behind plexiglas, were displayed dozens of his paperback western novels. Alix signed a petition to have him honored with a U.S. postage stamp.

After the brief excitement of Frontier Village, we continued west on Interstate 94, listening to episodes of Fresh Air on Alix's ipod. We drove through several rainstorms and passed New Salem Sue, world's largest holstein. Just at dark we reached Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drove five miles north from the interstate,through rugged coulees and hills, to a campground. We spotted several real buffalo along the way.

At our campground site, we popped the top, then Alix set out our modest dinner of sandwiches and chips. We'd had a late lunch at a Green Mill in Fargo (after discovering the downtown restaurants Alix had searched out on the internet were all closed on Sundays).

I took the top bunk, Alix the lower, and she had me read aloud the first chpater of The Golden Compass before we went to sleep.