My birthday weekend.

So I've just spent way too long trying to figure out what beast we ran into on Memorial Day weekend. I still don't know what it was. I really hope it wasn't the giant asian hornet. Do not google that, it's scary.

We were heading up to Okuma for just one night of camping after Typhoon Songda stole the rest of my birthday weekend, when a HUGE bee type creature landed on our windshield. This thing was terrifyingly large. So my immediate reaction was to reach over and turn on the wipers.

That was stupid.

I thought I saw it fly into the back window, but I looked and looked and didn't see anything so we just kept going.

Once we got to the cabin and we unloaded everything and made the bed we hadn't seen it anywhere and just assumed it was my imagination that saw it flying into the car. We spent the whole day outside. Swimming at the beach, taking walks and playing with rocks and sticks and sand. We ended the night with smores and after a particularly spirited tantrum decided it was bedtime for Thomas.

So there we are laying down in the dark. I was using a flashlight to read a magazine when all of a sudden that huge bee comes crawling out from in between the mattress and the wall. It was right in the middle of where my flashlight was shining so I don't know if the light was what attracted it or what. It just kept crawling, like no big deal, I'm just a gimongous bug.

So I shoved my child out of bed and screamed for Josh. Literally. I screamed. This is embarrassing as I've always been a DIY kind of girl when bugs show up. I have no aversion to grabbing a shoe and killing things. It seems that bravery is going out the window as we keep moving farther south and the bugs just keep getting bigger.

Josh took a long time to answer as he was outside laughing at my screech, but he did finally come in and kill it.

Needless to say it took a long time for me to calm down enough to sleep. I kept hearing noises that I was sure was another huge bee even though we looked in, around and under the bed for more and found none. We're pretty sure it was the same bug and it had somehow flown into the pile of bedding in the backseat and was just hiding.

Of course at one point I heard a really loud noise and decided to move the curtain only to find a lizard crunching on some very crunchy beetle it had found. At that point I figured the lizard would just eat everything in the room and eventually crashed out.


I think I'll stick to winter camping from now on. There weren't any bugs in January.