Camp Wormy

Any of you who know me know that I love bugs and it's really hard to gross me out when it comes to bugs. Even in our ghetto apartment in New York City I would nonchalantly pop baby cockroaches with one eye open in the kitchen in the middle of the night while I got a drink. Our Friday night camping experience, however, is still making my skin crawl and sometimes I feel like I want to vomit. As we hiked about a mile into our camping spot in the Laurel Highlands, we noticed something strange. All the trees were still bare and it literally looked like winter. That's because there was an inchworm infestation of gigantic proportions that carpeted the forest like an old school horror movie. These worms were EVERYWHERE and it seems like they are programmed to just climb up to the top of whatever they were on because on top of everything, billions of them were congregating. Every time I looked at Justin, he had twenty of these things mangled up together on top of his coat collar with no where else to go. They were all over our clothes, Bea was picking them up and trying to eat them, they were dropping in our food, and were our entertainment as we ate dinner, almost unable to eat our hot dogs with the mass of worms on the pole in the middle of the fire pit. The grossest part was realizing that all the drops we heard on top of the tent were, in reality, worm poop dropping all night long and not rainwater. About twenty of them managed to get into our tent that night and they crawled up to the very top of it and were hanging above our heads all night long while their comrades on the outside of the tent squirmed on top of the skylight. Basically, it was freaking sick. Henry was even grossed out by them and now I'm seriously reconsidering my life long dream of being an entomologist and I'm not looking forward to pulling out the tent and finding billions of tiny worm carcasses everywhere. I'm still shivering from it all. Blech!!!!!

On a more pleasant note, the ferns on the forest floor were amazing, especially since they grew in perfect circles and I found this totally awesome transparent flower on this strange plant. I have to look it up. We spotted some wild strawberries but they weren't ripe yet. Supposedly there are a million blackberries in that area during blackberry season.



Henry had a blast hiking around, playing with rocks, bugs, and both he and Bea slept perfectly through the night. When we finally got out of there we had a nice hike at a rock climbing area called Beam Rocks and then ate lunch at a fabulous place called Out of the Fire Cafe. We ate smoked salmon, soft shell crab, and a carrot/ginger/coconut/curry soup that was to die for. I'm going to try to make it this week so check the food blog for more details.