Traveling west Day 16, aka “Smells like butter”

Day 16 (June 16th) – Boise, ID to Cheyenne, WY (736 Miles) – If I had to pick one day where we were all cranky, travel-weary, and frustrated, this (Day 16) would be the day I pick. IMG_1340

It was 98 degrees (F) for most of the drive. About every 20 minutes, we thought we smelled baby poop, and we kept pulling off the highway at rest areas and checking Amelia, and she was always clean. A couple of wet diapers, but no poop.  We’d get back in the car and be on our way, and we’d smell it again, strongly. We’d pull over, check her again, look through the car to see if we had left a dirty diaper in the car – all negative. We’d drive, we’d stop. It was a long process.

IMG_1324We stopped at a big rest area/motel “oasis” in Wyoming called Little America. This is where we found the source of the problem. But there are two things that you should know before I tell you what I’ve learned.

1. Our daughters poop smells like butter, or buttered popcorn, about half the time.

2. While we were in Victoria, we went grocery shopping for the week, and I bought butter. While packing up to continue our trip, I saw that we didn’t use all the butter so I put it in a Glad plastic container (poor man’s Tupperware?) and put it in a bag with the food.

You can probably guess that the butter melted and leaked out all over the food bag.


Don’t keep butter in the car on a very hot drive through Wyoming, especially if your baby’s poop smells like butter.


It’s pretty specific, but it’s good advice.

We booked the hotel in Cheyenne while we were a couple hours away. Our GPS told us to take the I25 exit to get to our hotel, and when we got to the exit Continue reading “Traveling west Day 16, aka “Smells like butter””

Traveling west – the digital humanities tour day 14 and 15

Screen Shot 2015-06-23 at 1.56.40 AMDay 14 – Boise, ID – This was another two nights of rest without driving at all. Anywhere. Just hanging out at a really nice house with a really awesome family. On day 14 we had a spectacular salmon and rice dinner with salmon caught by a friend in Alaska. There was so much that it was all-you-can-eat with no shame involved. I performed a few card tricks just for fun, and was then excluded from the card game that happened afterwards. I did not consider this a problem.

Day 15  – More of the same, but Mexican for dinner. I worked on a writing job both these nights. I had been conducting interviews for a book that needs to go to press by the end of the month.  Janelle was an invaluable help, because she saw that I was stressed out, and told me to relax a little, and she would transcribe the interviews while I was driving us the rest of the way home.

[All of the pictures I took involved this family – and the children. They do their best to keep pics of their kids off the internet, so, not many pictures here.]

I did get to work outside a little bit
I did get to work outside a little bit.