Mimi takes a seat with her back to the wall. “I like to have space when I eat.”

“You know that this is a hotel restaurant,” I say. “And that the menu has photographs of the food?”

The restaurant is nice enough. Dark wood and stone, an ambience that splits the difference between a Gothic church and a medieval dungeon.

“Did someone tell you that the food here is good?”

The breakfast selections are proudly North American. Cholesterol rich and deep-fried yummy.

Two eggs any style, potatoes, bacon, and toast pledging allegiance. Pancakes with maple syrup and sausage humming an anthem. Eggs Benedict with ham waving a flag.

This is the kind of restaurant we try to avoid, the kind of restaurant that gives travel a bad name.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Why don’t you get the eggs Benny?”

“I hate eggs Benny.”

“That way, I can have some of your food.”

The place gets crowded fast. Men in shorts and polos. Women in sundresses and sandals. Children in branded T-shirts and running shoes.

“Tourists,” I whisper to Mimi. “We’re in a tourist petting zoo.”

“We’re tourists.”

Mimi orders a side of toast and a fruit cup.

“I thought you were hungry.”

Mimi watches a young couple as they weave their way through the restaurant, looking for a table.

“Is that her?”

“What?”

“The woman who knocked you down.”

“What?”

“Last night. At the Chinese restaurant. The one you walked back to her hotel.”

It takes a moment for me to catch up to Mimi.

“That’s this hotel?”

“What was her name?”

“Can you spell ‘stalking’?”

Mimi slow-eats her toast and picks at her fruit cup. “Don’t eat too fast,” she tells me. “We’re on vacation. There’s no need to rush.”

I can’t believe that Mimi has dragged me here on the off chance that we might bump into Kalea and Bryce.

“You know what the odds are?”

“What about those two?”

I’m nursing a piece of apple pie that Mimi has ordered for me when Kalea Tomaguchi and Bryce Osbourne appear.

“That’s them,” Mimi says with no hesitation, “isn’t it.”

ACCORDING TO ONE OF the postcards, Captain Trueblood’s Wild West Emporium had made a swing through the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway. The card that Uncle Leroy sent home from Amsterdam showed a windmill and several low-slung barges tied up to a dock.

Weather cold, it said. How are you?

We went to Amsterdam the year after we went to Paris. Mimi had found an article that mentioned a pipe museum on Prinsengracht that had an American Indian pipe in its collection.

“Don Duco,” Mimi told me. “He found a bunch of antique pipes while he was doing renovation work, and the hobby just got out of hand.”

“Eight euros to see a bunch of pipes?”

“They have an American Indian pipe,” Mimi told me with authority, “so maybe they have the Crow bundle as well.”