New Holland, PA

BUGS.... BUGS.... and more BUGS!!!

This is a theme for me today.... so bear with me as you travel through some of the less pictoral moments of life in an RV....

So while we are at Gally, Winnie gets to sit and hang out by the baseball field, right? Which means after every weekend trip we unload the fridge, bring in the toothbrushes, dump the tank..... close the toilet lid....

Well, this weekend as we are taking off to PA and feeling all cozy back in Winnie... and we are stuck in traffic going north to Baltimore (traffic any direction out of DC is worse than LA and Seattle combined, any day)... well anyway let's just say, its slow moving and Shayna has to use the bathroom. No problem. It is really convenient to be able to poop in your car. And she comes back up front and says... "ummm, every time I flush all these gnats come flying out of the toilet.." and I am like, oh mann, that is GROSS. And sure enough I go back there and its all fine, until you put your foot on the little trap door release and the black hole opens up and out comes this swarm of gnats. I was so grossed out I grabbed our Lysol spray and just started drowning them all over the bathroom.

Anyway, who knows how that party got started, I don't want to know. But we resolved it with a few more flushes, another dumping, and a "gross lets get outa here" trip to Chick-fil-A.

So now we are in an RV camp in Amish country. I'm blogging, so you know we have power and internet... but coming in we did pass many two story beautiful homes with candles in all the windows. Lots of horse and buggies on the road. We hit our first deer (or rather, it hit us. We saw him coming and slowed down enough but he had so much momentum he ran right into the side of Winnie. He was ok, turned back around and ran back up the mountain.) We also drove by fields of corn and grass with millions of fireflies hovering and twinking to each other... it was so mesmerizing, like fireworks on the ground, or like the marsh fire (if you've read Magyk!)

The kids have been totally into the fireflies, which brings you to my second bug story. After driving in last night, they've been just waiting for dusk so they could run around and try to catch some. We even got a little "bug house" at the camp store. So.. the sun starts to set and those little bums start lighting up... and my kids are having a ball carefully collecting them and putting them in the bug house. Under close observation we were getting very curious about the flashing, cuz we noticed that if one would light up, they all would. Or sometimes it would look more like music, where they would light up in a row. It was so cool, sometimes a bug outside the bug house would light up and everyone inside would respond. By the way, we kept the bug house door open. Shayna would have no part in keeping these guys against their will. (Oh! this weekend also marks her one year anniversary as a vegetarian. Last year when we went to an Amish farm we got to feed the chickens.... end of story....)

ANYWAY.... We theorized that the fireflies lighting up was some kind of mating call. Then we noticed after awhile the bugs flashed at each other a lot less. The bug house eventually got all dark. And when Shayna went to go check on them, she said "well. They are all clumped up in the corner. I guess they found their mates!"

Goodnight friends.... -C