Exploring Uncle Corey and Aunt Marsha’s neighborhood and walking Maya!

This particular seat in the car comes with surround smell. Probably not included in the base model.

Long drive today from Yellowstone to Seattle. Mostly through smoke filled landscapes.

Breaking my streak of never seeing any interesting wild life, we have encountered quite a few Bison here in Yellowstone. This scene overlooking a valley full of the great beasts is my favorite.

Our fist stop in Yellowstone National Park. Doesn’t it look like there’s a dragon in the cave, breathing fire? The water flows out in small, crashing waves as well. So otherworldly!

Esme has a quickly growing collection of Jr Ranger badges from each of the National Parks we have visited. The procedure is a little different at each park, but usually includes a swearing in ceremony. This one at Devil’s Tower was a little different in that it was a poem in rhyming couplets. Very sweet!

(I really love the look on the male ranger’s face. More often than not the rangers or the bystanders have a very similar look when kids are getting their badges. It’s just the sweetest thing!)

This moment might be the single moment that makes our entire trip worth the time, money and effort. We had driven into Badlands National Park and stopped at our first vista pull off. We went walking into the dry, dusty landscape and up to this opening in the rock wall. Esme, a couple of steps ahead of me, waited for the previous visitor to move aside and as she walked up to take in the view exclaimed, “Oh my!” And not in a canned sort of way, in a slow, amazed, full of awe sort of way. It was perfect.

It was another Laura Ingalls Wilder kind of day again today. We stopped in Walnut Grove, on the Banks of Plum Creek and then ended the day by pitching our tent on the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet, South Dakota. I just really love walking where Laura and Mary, et al. walked, smelling the prairie and feeling the hot wind.

What is an hour detour, when you’ve come this far already? We diverged from the highways onto county roads (Lettered, here in Wisconsin, we travelled on P, N, SS and C) to make a pilgrimage to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birth site. Or there abouts. I think their Little House in the Big Woods was originally located in the middle of the current street, so I’ll forgive the local historians for that one.

Sweet little replica cabin in the cornfields to mark Laura’s birth site, and I couldn’t be happier to have visited!

Most of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is best (and only) viewed from the water. The girls and I had hoped to take a lake cruise to see the sights, but, despite how it looks in this photo, the water was too rough and most of the day’s sailings were cancelled.

So we made lemonade and drove up to the Miner’s Castle overlook and we overlooked it. Gorgeous. Waves rushing in and out of the cove, the wind in our hair. We could have stayed there for hours, except for the other visitors wanting a spot to overlook as well.

This little beach on the shores of Lake Superior was directly across from our campsite in the Hurricane Beach campground in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We discovered that the lake has some amazing rocks and spent a good amount of time playing with them this evening.

Our campsite has a (tree filled) view of the lake and we can hear the waves crashing constantly. Beautiful!