The first
two days were heaven! All three
flights got into Orlando airport when scheduled, the car rental was smooth, we
drove from the Orlando airport to our VRBO rental in just over an hour, and
easily found our very attractive beachside rental home for the next 12
days. We settled in quickly, went
right to sleep, and arose the following morning to bright sunshine and decently
warm temperatures. The house was
immaculate, the kitchen the best stocked we’d ever encountered, the beach
uncrowded and clean, the water not too chilly. Sizable turtles roamed our back yard, munching our
grass. We were happy campers. A second such day followed.
On day four,
my grandson, Elis, awoke with a high fever and a cough like a barking
seal. I’d never heard anything
quite like it. He set up camp on
one of the sofas in the living room, wrapped in a sweatshirt with the hood
pulled up over his head and covered with a fuzzy blanket. He kept a large box of tissues by his
side. This went on for the next
five days. We couldn’t all go
together anywhere, as someone always had to stay with Elis. We could never go
out to eat. Also, the weather had
completely changed. Gone was the
sun and with it, the warmth.
Instead, we had gale-force winds blowing the rain sideways, along with
cold temperatures. It was
impossible to see the ocean just steps from our backdoor, as it was totally
socked in.
One day,
when it was only cold and dreary, and not actively raining, we all, except Elis
and his mother, Riitta, went to the Canaveral National Seashore, where we
walked on Turtle Mound, a 35-foot miden (archeologist-speak for refuse pile) of
oyster shells from the Timucuan tribe between 800 and 1400 AD.
Then Riitta
had a bad night with itching. She
awoke covered with large red welts.
We were mystified as there were no mosquitoes and no one spotted any
other bugs. After a second night
like this, we suspected bed bugs.
We tore apart the bed and found evidence. We saw bedbugs of varying sizes, some of their shed
exoskeletons, and evidence of their poop, which looked like a Magic Marker
swipe on the sheet. We sent photos
of the bugs we trapped in a sandwich bag and also of Riitta’s neck, arms and
chest to the management. Wilma,
who was sleeping a few feet from her parents’ bed on one of the twin mattresses
taken from my bedroom, also had a few bites, but nothing like her
mother’s. My son, Ajay, sleeping
right next to Riitta, had nary a bite, but then that is the pattern in our
family: Riitta gets all of the bug
bites, no matter where we are.
Elis, meanwhile, was in his own bedroom and bath off of the garage. Neither Suji and Geoff, nor I, in our
respective bedrooms, had any bites, nor did an examination of our beds yield
any evidence.
We decided
to abandon the room with the bed bugs altogether. Suji went out and bought diatomaceous earth and a
queen-sized blow-up mattress.
(Diatomaceous earth is a naturally-occurring, soft siliceous sedimentary
rock that is easily crumbled into a fine powder. It consists of fossilized remains of diatoms, thus the
name, a type of hard-shelled protist -- a large grouping that comprises
mostly single-celled organisms. It
has many uses in explosives, filtration, abrasives, agriculture, filters, construction,
pest control, etc. The fine powder
absorbs liquids from the waxy outer layer of insects’ exoskeletons, causing
them to dehydrate. More than
you ever wanted to know from Wikipedia.
We removed
everything of theirs except their suitcases from that bedroom to the basement.
We put all of the Finns’ suitcases in a circle of the earth in their bedroom so
that no bedbugs would get into them, and drew a line of the earth at the
doorway so no bugs could escape to go to any of the other bedrooms. That night, we pulled the rented van
into the garage, closed and locked the door, and lowered all of the seats so
that there was a totally flat space. We wrestled the blow-up mattress covered in a
freshly-washed sheet into the van and added some blankets and pillows. Then we all settled down for the
night. In the morning, when Ritta
threw back the sheet, there was a bed bug. That was it!
Suji arranged for a room that night for the Finns at the local Hampton
Inn. The Finns then started
washing and drying all of their clothes at the hottest possible
temperatures. They also
washed all of their bed linens.
When their clothes were dry, they put them into huge zip-lock bags so no
more bugs could get into them. Just before we were to drive them to the motel,
they stripped off the clothes they were wearing, put newly washed and dried
clothes on, and packed a zip-lock bag of pjs and clothes for the next day. We
certainly didn’t want to carry any of the bugs to the motel. One day ahead was as far as we could
think and plan at that point.
Suji did a
lot of research on bed bugs. We
are all experts now. They can live
for 18 months without a blood meal.
Once they’ve had a blood meal, they might not come back to bite for up
to nine days. We learned that if
we didn’t eradicate them through a heating process, we could all possibly take
them back to our respective homes.
That was the galvanizing fact!
Suji contacted a local bedbug removal service, and got tons of advice on
how to proceed. Tickets had been
purchased for all of us to go to the Kennedy Space Center, about an hour away,
but that plan was immediately scrapped in favor of bed bug remediation.
The bed bug
guy, who said he had worked for 60 days straight because of the epidemic of bed
bugs in the area, told us to put all of our clothes in the zip-lock bags. The rest of us brought all of our stuff
down to the basement where we spread it out in a single layer or hung it on
hangers from pipes near the ceiling, leaving room to pull the van in, as it had
to be de-bugged, too. We threw out
hundreds of dollars of food that was not in the fridge, and gave the food that
had been in the fridge to our next-door neighbors, whom we had befriended. We brought all of our suitcases down to
the garage. We tidied up the house,
as we were never going to go above the basement again.
Suji and
Geoff drove all of the rest of us and huge bags of clothes to the laundromat,
then returned to the rental to await the bed bug guy. They pulled the van into the garage. When the bed bug guy arrived, he set up
five heaters around the basement and spread a perimeter of poison around the
edges, in case the bed bugs ran away from the heat source. He also brought in a number of milk
crates on which to spread out all of our stuff, because he didn’t like the way
we’d arranged everything. Of
course in doing this, all of our stuff got mixed up. He raised the heat to 150 degrees for three hours. While his assistant watched the heat
gauge, he drove Suji and Geoff to the laundromat so that they could do their
laundry, too. After the three
hours, he came back for Suji and Geoff and all of their clothes in new,
different zip-lock bags. We did
the environment no favor that day, as we had to throw away dozens of
barely-used plastic bags, but we had no choice. They paid the man and Geoff came to pick us all up while
Suji did her valiant best to separate the things into family piles for easy
packing. We all re-packed our bags
and checked into three separate rooms at the Hampton Inn for our last three
nights, never to return to that house!
We didn’t eat dinner until almost 9 p.m. that night, and of course we
had to eat all of our remaining meals out.
On our last
night of the vacation, in probably the worst weather of the trip, we drove to
the Kennedy Space Center, not wanting to waste $379. worth of entrance
tickets. Since we had had to
indicate the day we were coming to use them when we ordered them online, and we
had chosen the day before, we weren’t entirely sure we could get in one day
later using the original tickets.
While it was warmish and drizzling as we left the restaurant after
breakfast, the weather proceeded to deteriorate as we drove. By the time we reached our destination,
the temperature had dropped probably 20 degrees, and there were again
gale-force winds blowing heavy rain sideways and none of us were really dressed
for it. My biggest fear was that
all of the rain would freeze on the roads, as snow was predicted for northern
Florida that day and the next. Happily, it did not freeze, as the sun finally came out.
Happily, our
Space Center tickets were accepted.
Other than having to stand outside in this truly horrendous weather for
long periods of time in order to get into various attractions, we had a super
time at the Space Center, learned a lot, and were very glad we went. We spent the entire day and actually
closed down the place at 6 p.m.
Prototype of the Mars rover. Mars is the next destination for NASA.
In the car
driving home, the final assault on us came when Suji checked her phone and
discovered that both the Finns’ and Geoff’s and her flights the next day had been
cancelled
because of
extremely treacherous weather in the northeast. Since Geoff’s parents lived only about an hour away, Geoff
called them to ask if they could stay with them for two nights, hoping to get a
flight out on Saturday, when surely things would be improved in Philadelphia.
When Suji
and Geoff again appeared at the airport two days later, they learned that their
flight had been cancelled once again.
After an hour and a half, another plane was rounded up and they finally
left, returning to Philadelphia non-stop.
Another
major disappointment was that we all, who are enamored of Mexico’s Day of the
Dead, had wanted to see the new Pixar movie “Coco” together. Alas, it had opened in the States for
Thanksgiving and by Christmastime, it was long gone.
One of the
few bright spots in this horror story was that at a very, very low point in the
trip, Suji said to all of us, “There is no one I would rather be with on the
worst vacation of my life than all of you,” which provided some levity. Years in the future, we will recall
this travesty of a vacation and laugh. However, we are nowhere near ready to do that yet.