Sleep Tight!

When I was little, I remember somebody saying this a lot before we went to bed... and I remember saying it to my boys sometimes!

Crazy isn't it.  We live and work in a tropical country where there are all kinds of biting bugs and dangerous snakes.  But, where did William get bit by a snake?  In the woods below Granddaddy's house in Virginia on one of our furloughs!  Thankfully, it was just a black snake and Mr. Intelligent William was smart enough to know that.  And where did Uncle Byron get attacked by wild, vicious, biting bugs?  In Georgia!

Uncle Byron and I went down to Georgia for a meeting and were very happy to be given a night in a hotel room by the church.  We checked in and got ready for bed after a long trip.  In the bathroom I noticed what looked like a few ticks crawling on the white wall.  I thought, Well, we are in Georgia in the middle of lot of pine trees and woods.  I captured them and flushed them down the toilet.

As I was turning down the covers, Uncle Byron went to brush his teeth and I got the remote to the TV to see if there was any news on.  I also checked my phone to see if there were any messages from Granny and the boys who had stayed back in North Carolina.  Uncle Byron came and sat down on his side of the bed and took over the remote control privileges!  Some where in there I noticed another tick on the wall near the bed.  I got up to get a closer look.  Uncle Byron asked what I was doing.  I told him that I'd seen some bugs in the bathroom that looked like ticks and now I'd found some more on the wall.  He came to look and decided that weren't ticks at all.  They were something else.  They reminded us of the bugs that had been all over William's bed in Brazil in that other story I told - barbeiros or kissing bugs.  Uncle Byron got a cup out of the bathroom and we started collecting them.  Then I saw one on the head board of the bed!  I yanked up the covers and sheets from the edge of bed and found more live and some dried little bodies.  It was bed bugs!

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Byron got redressed and went down to talk to the hotel manager.  When he came back, we had the key to another hotel room in a brand new part of the hotel that still smelled of wet paint.  We checked the bed and the walls very carefully before we went to sleep in that room.  But Uncle Byron had already been bitten by the little varmints.  He started itching and scratching and well, we ended up having a long miserable night that evening for more reasons than one....

The hotel manager never admitted that the little bugs in our plastic cup where really bed bugs.  Sadly, the hotel chain did not give the money back for the bug filled room either.  We learned a lesson and a lot about bed bugs.  We left our luggage on the back porch when we got back to North Carolina and sprayed them down with bug spray.  We took our clothes off in that bottom laundry room and put them right in the washing machine and took baths down there before going into the rest of the house.

And Uncle Byron itched for a good week!

The lesson of this story is:  
1. Believe it when you hear about bed bugs.  They are real!  Check the bed before you lay down in a hotel!  
2. It doesn't matter where you are - Brazil or America - dangers are all around just waiting to bite you!

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Now it's time for me to go to bed....
Oooo, I feel all itchy.
I think I'll look around before I get in my bed tonight,
 just to be sure no bed bugs are going to bite!