Bedbugs.

And maybe mosquitoes.

Not being a “providentialist” (or whatever they call themselves– the Calvinist-leaning types, which is most of my church, so I don’t mean that as a slam) I don’t believe that God plans or ordains evil, so I can’t really imagine the little vampires as part of day six.

~ ~ ~

I’m ready to give a detailed account of how unhelpful and misinforming was the staff at the Grotto Bay Beach Resort in Bermuda, but I can’t expect my little blog to get enough hits to change much.  (Feel free to leave now, total gripe to follow.)

To catalog their mis-actions (in order to vent and prevent others from being as suckered as we):

• Telling my husband “It’s no big deal, this weather brings them inside”
  • I remember thinking, They’re reacting like I do to mosquitoes!  How can there be any comparison? But I was soothed by the nonchalance.
  • The truth: Any real bedbugs are already going to be inside because that’s where they find their yummies.
• “Cleaning” the room by changing the sheets and spraying some smelly stuff on the tile floor around the area rug the bed sits on.
  • They changed only the sheets.  Maybe the blanket.  The bedspread they put back on the “clean” bed was the same one that had been over crawling bugs the night before.
  • I don’t know if there was actually anything useful in the spray; I do know that neither the spray nor the hand that wielded it removed the blood-splotch of the bug Jay unknowingly stepped on (or the progressively smaller spots as he walked away).
    • I include this as a problem mainly because I expected evidence that “huge” to be taken more seriously.
• The rugs may never even have been vacuumed after we reported being violated.
  • I know the under-the-bed was never vacuumed– not once we were there, and maybe not even since the room’s “recent renovation” before we arrived.  It was filthy, and not the least reassuring for us wondering what to do next.

My brief Googling revealed that anything possibly infected should be washed and dried hot.   Jay was confident that, this being a nice place, they would be appropriately embarrassed and offer “whatever” to make it up to us.  We decided all we needed for “whatever” would be getting the room zeroed and getting our clothes cleaned.

• Jay was told he had to buy washing tokens (at $3.50 a pop) if he wanted to do laundry.
• We found a bug running across the bed the very night after we reported the problem and all the work was done.
  • This is when we noticed the bedspread was the same.

Instead of washing the clothes we bagged them (left them out in sub-zero until we could wash them hot).
I felt incredibly angry that we (translate that I, I was the only one “with the time”) were being asked to pay them to clean up their lack of precaution during a rare vacation.

And as mad as I was I couldn’t bring myself to be nasty or fully speak my mind to the old lady that came in cleaning clothes to ask how the room was now.

“Not good,” (I did say!) “We found another bug, and the same spread was reused from the dirty bed.”

Maybe I should have trying to sound angry, because she only looked confused from me to the room and didn’t seem to know how to respond.  I wanted to tell her to vacuum under the bed, I wanted to say, “Take out all the bedding on both beds and start over.”

But you don’t talk to your grandma like that.  And nothing like that happened.

Today I wish I’d gone down to the front desk (where people my own age worked) and said exactly what was on my mind.

Because today, I found physical evidence– beyond yesterday’s dozen bites– that they sent bed bugs home with us.

No thank you, Grotto Bay Beach Resort.  There were many enjoyable things that I would have rather talked about, but if any googling travelers are looking for more info, I want them to be forewarned.

~ ~ ~

Many thanks to my mom and my friend Cheryl for coming over the same afternoon I mentioned bites and helped me bag and extract my softs to the chill Alaskan outdoors, awaiting decontamination before their return.

Cheryl is a geologist, and old-earther, so my opening observation was a fun small joke together.  “No,” she said, agreeing, “I can’t believe bedbugs were a part of God’s perfect plan.”

Anyone facing the question of whether to act should have a friend as paranoid as Cheryl.

She and her husband caught me after church and proceeded to explain her massive amounts of research and paranoia (which came first? One feeds the other, I’m learning), and to volunteer their tyvek-wrapped help.

Without her initiation and confidence I doubt I’d be as (almost) comfortable as I am to go to bed now.

Praying we got everything, and more plans for tomorrow (*sigh* good bye dinosaurs), we are in utterly new territory in absolutely the wrong time.

Other than it is winter, and that is my largest consolation, just now.

Hmmm, that and gratitude I wasn’t trying NaNo this year ;)