Yesterday, after leaving Medora (or was it The Lawrence Welk Show?) we squeezed in a short visit to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Vast areas of the park’s rugged landscape are occupied by prairie dogs scurrying around, digging holes and standing on their hind legs to get a better look at who knows what. Visitors pull their cars over to the side of the road by the dozens all day long to gape at these little, hyperactive animals and take their photographs. My personal suspicion is that prairie dogs are just small squirrels that have written a compelling business plan and hired a superior marketing agency.

The scenery on the 133 mile drive between Medora and Bismarck is lovely.  But there is not much there there. It is so unpopulated that exit ramps without purpose appear to have been constructed just to provide employment. We drove by dozens of exits that literally led nowhere and offered nothing.

Mariah and I spent the rest of our day flying from Bismarck to Minneapolis and then to Seattle. When we landed, Harry, who had arrived earlier in the day to join us for the next two weeks on our west coast adventure, picked us up. We were thrilled to see him after being apart for three weeks.

This morning, Mariah, Harry and I had breakfast in Seattle at a highly-recommended, little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Biscuit Bitch. They serve biscuit-based breakfasts with heavy sides of sass and sarcasm to a non-stop line of patrons who form a long queue out of their door and onto the sidewalk. Their food lived up to the hype.

We then visited the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum. It was overcrowded with other visitors jostling with one another to photograph the glass sculptures on display. Harry enjoyed the large-scale exhibits a great deal. Mariah and I had seen similar work of Chihuly’s with our friends Nancy and George when it was on display at Boston’s MFA, so we were more interested in the short documentary films and interviews with Dale Chihuly.

Our next stop was Seattle’s’ famed Pike Place Market. If you combine Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market and New York City’s Fulton Fish Market, locate it on the shore of Elliot Bay on Puget Sound and provide a view of the Olympic Mountains as a backdrop, you would have a close proxy for Seattle’s original farmer’s market at Pike Place. It is busy, noisy, crowded, vibrant and overflowing with vendors hawking fresh fish, produce, flowers and so much more from their stalls, aisle after aisle.

And then? We all came back to our Airbnb and napped before we went out for a quick dinner and a long walk to see what else we could see.