Camping catasrophe

I know this is Sadie's blog, but this entry is about poor Chester and the camping trip from Hades.

In an effort to "get away from it all," Kevin and I drove a couple of hours up to SE Nebraska to spend a weekend camping, hiking (Kevin), studying for finals (me), and relaxing.

It started off near idyllic, our only struggle coming from wet wood and a smokey fire. Our camp site was beautiful and secluded - a must for Sadie and her barking issues.

We had a tasty dinner of sausage and corn and snuggled with the dogs in the tent. Sadie was great throughout the night. She only barked a couple of times and we found out why in the morning, thanks to little raccoon footprints all over the picnic table.

Breakfast took awhile to get started, but was super tasty by the time we sat down to enjoy. Then, Kevin and Chester got themselves ready for their hike while I readied the hammock for my studying.



I was just getting into a great study groove, when I heard my name from across the clearing and turned to see Kevin and Chester returning after less than an hour.

"Hey, back already?"
"Come here."
"Ok. Is everything ok?"
"No. Come here."

Wow. Ok. I scrambled out of the hammock and booked it to the boys.

"What's wrong?"
"Look," he said, pointing to his shirt. His shirt that was covered in ticks! "They are all over us."

And they were. ALL. OVER. THEM.


We managed to wipe most of them off Kevin because he was pretty well covered by his clothes and they hadn't embedded themselves, but Chester was a different story.

DOZENS of them were embedded.

Somehow, we'd forgotten tweezers so Kevin went into town to buy a pair. Thanks to roadwork it took him more than two hours to drive the "17 miles" to Falls City! I got a lot of studying done during that time, at least.

Anyway, after Kevin finally returned, it took us hours to get them all out of poor C-Dawg. I tried to count them, but stopped at 53 - and I was only half way through the bottom of the bottle.

Chester handled the removal process as well as could be expected. His stress passed on to Sadie at times and she went a little nuts, but you do what you gotta do for those you love, right?

Needless to say, we were TICKED. Once we removed all of the parasites, we packed up the car and got the heck out of there.