Last summer our family of three, plus an ill-starred house plant, set off to drive across the country from the Pacific Northwest (Seattle) to New England (Cambridge, Mass.). We were moving from West to East Coast and figured our four-year-old would better appreciate the reality of the move if she saw the country that lay in between our old home and the new. And she did.

Our vehicle, not exactly "of choice" for this particular journey, was a red Honda Civic, two-door. To enter and exit this car involves a kind of yoga. It was soon filled with every kind of thing--two camping stoves, tents, a panoply of sing-along CDs, the whole library of Little House on the Praire & the works of E.B. White (books read aloud for the 4-year-old in each of us).

The trip took 13 days & turned out to be really fun!--except for the difficulty in finding vegetarian food between Colorado and Chicago. Another disappointment was learning that the word "Teton" in "Grand Tetons" does indeed mean breast (I thought maybe it was Native American for something less juvenile). Here are some high points.

In Yellowstone park there was a traffic jam comprised of SUVs, Harleys, and herds of buffalo (a.k.a. Bison). Our daughter loved the buffalo babies, who were nursing and never in a hurry. In fact, none of the buffalo seemed to be in a hurry; hence the bottleneck.