Being an active consumer of travel articles and literature, I had heard of the dreaded bed bugs. I’d also heard in addition to being a plaque on hotels, they were making a comeback in residential areas, especially ones popular with college students.

I noticed what seemed like, from said articles, might be a sign of bed bugs at our hotel, a small stain on the sheets in one of the beds.

I didn’t notice it until very late at night though, and I was very tired, so I pointed to out to Andrew and said he might want to sleep in the other bed, but left it at that as I was tired, and feel like I am usually just paranoid about these things.

Fast forward to the AM and we both had a number of ichy, somewhat swollen bites. Compared to the pictures on the internet (super yuck) we got off pretty good with less than 20 bites each- some of these photos show people absolutely covered in little mosquito type bites.

The good news is the bites don’t do anything to you but itch. The bugs don’t carry any diseases, and they don’t attach themselves to you. But they can hide out in your stuff or clothes, and if you take them home with you they will very much make themselves at home, and become very hard to eradicate.

So we had to quarantine all our things, go wash all our clothes that we’d brought up to the room, and inspect everything that couldn’t be washed for any signs of these tiny bugs.

Everything looked OK, but we’re keeping it all in plastic bags for a bit just in case. The whole process slowed our getting out of the hotel room, which we very much wanted to do, and getting out to Gooseberry Mesa, where we were hoping to arrive by early afternoon.

Instead we spent the afternoon inspecting and washing clothes.

The good news was at least the hotel didn’t put up a fight on paying for the room and providing a laundromat where we could get the laundry done, although it did take a few rounds of confused communications with the limited-english-speaking laundromat attendant to let us do the laundry in the self-serve machines rather than dropping it off, which I avoid b/c I use only ALL Free and Clear detergent, and have a good amount of low-heat dry only synthetics, and wanted to get out of the area ASAP.

A delicious mint with Oreo bits shake from Maggie Moos (a chain, but still good) helped ease the discomfort a bit, especially since we’d been looking forward to another one of these shakes since we had the first one from this location back in July when we were enroute to Bryce Canyon.