Nampa, ID: Save the leather!

The first day of driving is behind us covering roughly 430 miles and revealing many of Oregon’s treasures, including the morning sun beaming down on Portland, leafs changing colors in the Gorge, the Wallowa Mountains framed by green pastures and grazing cattle, and slivered views of the Eagle Cap Wilderness smothered by rain storms.

We concluded the day in Nampa, ID, the second largest city in the state, which does not mean that it’s big. The town’s population is less than 100,000. Sadly, that’s about all I can say about Nampa since rather than absorbing the town on the way in, I was fretfully trying not to allow my leather seats to absorb run away breast milk! No, this time it was not me leaking. Rather, the bag of frozen milk that I had pulled out of the cooler to thaw so we would save Mikayla from instantaneously tensing up and turning red the moment she realized she was hungry, forcing us to rush to warm a bottle in the hotel sink, (we’ve started an early evening tradition of Daddy feedings – with the exception of Saturdays, which swap out with a morning feeding in commemoration of College Game Day) had sprung a leak. As a result, my efforts to be a step ahead of my daughter were foiled and I suddenly found myself playing with a bag of milk as though it were a labyrinth, tilting it every which way to prevent further leakage while safely maneuvering the car off of the freeway.

The milk incident alone is probably enough to justify the day’s theme of "save the leather", especially since the drive really couldn’t have gone any better, but it was only one of two very close calls involving bodily fluids and my seats. Let’s just say we nearly had a disaster when the sloped driver seat/makeshift diaper changing station just about turned into a fountain. Fortunately, just before the pump switched on, John came in for the save, swiftly placing a clean diaper/seat protector in the nick of time. Phew!