In the Saint Croix River Valley, we stumbled upon the Franconia Sculpture Park, its colorful sculptures popping up as we drove along the back roads. It is 43 acres of amazing artworks, presented by a nonprofit organization that also sponsors artist residencies and community arts programming. We wandered the grassy preserve in awe. My favorite was a multi-colored play structure by Bridget Beck, whose says her works create play lands she has imagined. “I believe that there are too few interesting, magical and thought-provoking places,” she states. “I see my sculptures as places to escape responsibility and seriousness. … I want drudgery as a prisoner and the swing to reign.” I’m totally with you, Bridget.

The bakery at Polebridge Mercantile is legendary. More than one person we met on the road, hearing we were headed to Montana, said with reverence, “You have to go to Polebridge. People wait in line for the bear claws to come out of the oven.” The Mercantile is more than 100 years old, built in 1914, just outside Glacier National Park. It’s a way station for travelers, rafters, and other intelligentsia looking for food, drink, merriment and fresh-baked sweets. The website describes founder William L. “Bill” Adair this way: “He fished, using only one fly (the Coachman), and drank and grew king-sized cabbages while his wife (and later, after she died, a second wife) ran the store and lived in their homestead cabin, which is now the Northern Lights Saloon.” The bakery was started in 1994, and continues to follow the recipes Dan Kaufman, a third-generation baker from Idaho who owned the Merc for 15 years. The afternoon we visited, bear claws were going in and out of the oven, along with gluten-free pineapple-coconut bars. Yum.

Glacier is so vast it’s hard to describe. We traversed the Going to the Sun Road on the free shuttle, rolling past cascading waterfalls, breathtaking vistas, the Weeping Wall, and precipitous drops. Then we stepped aboard an old wooden boat to tour Saint Mary Lake, where pieces of the mountains form tiny islands. We hiked with a ranger to the beautiful Saint Mary Falls, past wildflowers and aquamarine water sparking in the hot sun. The indescribable color is due to light reflecting off sediment in the water.