The Ant Wars

This sounds like the title to a sci-fi horror flick. Our most recent invasion of alien species started about a week ago. We moved into a parking site at the Gilroy Elks lodge on Thursday, September 18th. The first day was uneventful. We visited with our son, Glen, and his family. On Friday, however, I set up the reverse osmosis gear and began to fill our water tank. When we returned from Glen’s place that evening we were greeted by something on the order of ten thousand teeny tiny sugar ants marching across the floor. The ants go marching two by two, Hurrah! Hurrah! Then three by three and four by four…you get the idea. We grabbed the vacuum hose and started sucking them up, five by five, six by six…still they came, seven by seven, eight by eight…

I grabbed the flashlight and started searching outside. I had apparently laid one of my water hoses through their nest and the hose was alive with ants, nine by nine, ten by ten… I unhooked the water hoses and knocked the ants off the equipment and stowed it. Meanwhile Judy was still sucking them up, eleven by eleven, twelve by twelve and still they came out of the woodwork. Ever feel like screaming? At ten that night we unhooked the power and changed campsites in the dark to try to get away from these tiny beasties.

After about an hour of sucking up ants we seemed to be mostly ant free so we went to bed. Next morning, you guessed it, it was back to sucking up ants. We stopped by Ace Hardware and picked up some ant traps and insecticide. We packed up and moved to Hollister where we park on a paved parking lot. Still they came.

We stayed two days at Hollister and sucked up ants the whole time. Finally time came to move back to Gilroy and I pulled over to the dump station. When I opened the door to the sewer hose compartment, a six inch tube the fits above the water tanks crossways in the coach, I came across the mother lode; fifty thousand teeny tiny ants. I went to work with the insecticide and water hose to flush them all out.

Today after eight days of battling we have gotten the body count down to a mere dozen. Meanwhile we have scrubbed and cleaned about everything in the coach. Dishes get washed and stored immediately. Not a scrap of food nor a single cookie crumb remains on the table or floor. There is borax and insecticide around the tires and jacks and we suspend the power cable over the tires and exhaust pipe to keep it off the ground.

This is just a little too close to nature. It must be time to head for the mountains.

Good bye for now from Gary and Judy in a very clean coach.