What wasn't so adorable, was what came out after the sun went down. Last time we went up, it was earlier in the summer... and apparently, September has more creepy crawlers!
Gratefully the girls had both fallen to sleep by 9:30 when the excitement started. Jeremy had left to get something from the plane and check out the facilities. I was sitting by the campfire pondering something deep and intellectual while I waited for him to return. After a while I saw his lantern light come around the corner at the top of the pathway... and all of the sudden my deep and intellectual thought was interrupted by Jeremy hollering out "Oh #@%^" (really people, nobody is perfect, and who is to say you would not have said the same thing, huh?) Jeremy started to high step run un-realistically fast down the path towards camp. I never, in my life, have seen anyone run like that... not even the roadrunner on "Wile Coyote". I'm not kidding.
So as Jeremy gets to camp and is trying to calm down and tell me what almost ate him... he says "It was a spider!!!"...... and as I pause to ponder the fact that Jeremy just ran (in his own words) "screaming like a girl" back to camp because of a small spider, he gasps "A tarantula!".
I've only seen tarantulas in little cages at the pet stores, so I had it in my head this would be a 3 or so inch black hairy spider. We armed ourselves with a couple flashlights, a lantern, and the camera as we VERY slowly made our way up the path to go check out our fellow desert camper. On the way, Jeremy explained that he had seen something move in the dark to the side of the path. He shined his light in the direction of the movement as the tarantula charged toward him. Thus, his naughty language.
As we got closer, we could see the tarantula sitting in the middle of the path.... it didn't move for a few minutes, so we were able to get close enough to determine it's size. The creepy little camping buddy was as big, if not a bit larger than my hand, which made it 6 1/2 to 7 inches long. We researched it online later, and found out the species is a Payson Blonde Tarantula, which indeed can grow to 7 inches.
We were talking about it last night and wished we would have attempted to put the flashlight down on the ground close to it... but it is easier to say that, when we are sitting comfortably on our couch, rather than standing on a dark pathway in the great outdoors with monster tarantula staring us down.
After we got our pictures of the tarantula, we headed over to the restroom building to see what was over there. We found a few of these:
And this:
And an un-countable amount of other flying or crawling things. Let us not forget to mention the dead lizard on one of the brochure boxes. Needless to say, after seeing all that we saw, if something would have jumped out at me, I would have started to cry!
After all our fun that night, we still had one visitor while packing up to leave the next day. Though this one wasn't as scary. Piper had been chasing around a little lizard on the tarmac, and although it would run from her, it never ran very far. It didn't take Jeremy long to scoop it up for her and put it in her hands to hold. The lizard sat on her hands for a short time and then ran up her arm into her shirt! He ran around on her back for a bit and had her laughing real good. Then he came out for a photo-op and jumped back on the tarmac!
It was a fun little trip that we will always remember for the creepy crawlers! But we won't be going back in the month of September!!!
1 comment:
We had one of those tarantulas hanging around at girls camp this year during testimony meeting. It was hard to feel spiritual with girls screaming at the top of their lungs everytime it shifted directions and headed towards them. Finally one of the girls grabbed a camp manual and swatted the poor thing.
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