Thursday - Day 172 - Army of Ants

After we moved the camper earlier in the week, John reminded me I hadn't written about the Army of Ants that invaded our camper.  How could I forget about the ant brigade?

When we came home from moving the camper late Monday afternoon, John had a meeting in Orlando and left for a few hours.  James and I started to notice a few ants here and there, but we did not think much of it initially.  A few ants in the camper is normal and nothing to panic about.

I started a game with James.  He is always looking to earn money for the toy vending machines in the office. I give him little tasks and chores to do when he wants to help me around the RV for quarters.  When he began killing the few ants we saw with his shoe, I offered him .10 cents per ant.  Before I knew it, he had killed ten ants.

That was more then normal, I was slightly alarmed, but wasn't overly concerned until I heard him yell, "there are too many mom, so many, I can't kill them all!"

I went over to check and in the space where the RV slides out was a hidden hole.   John was planning to move the camper over a few inches in the morning away from a tree, because we could not completely extend our living room slide which created the hole.  The ants were now flowing inside faster then we could kill them.

We had already moved the vacuum inside to dispose of the ant carcass.  I was now using it to suck up live ants.  The more I removed, the more ants flowed inside.  Now I was panicked.  

John came home just in time to save us from the army of ants.  I was thoroughly skeeved out at this point, and scratching invisible ants from my arms and legs.  

My husband had a theory, we may have disturbed an ant mound pulling the camper back in or better yet, the ants had made a home in the basement of our camper, enjoying their newfound source of food and we shook them loose during the move.  

Either theory deeply disturbed me.  My fearless husband sprayed outside and in, vacuumed the dead ants, both on the carpet and inside a cabinet they were migrating to and he cleaned the vacuum which was swarming with live ants.  By the time he was done every last ant was gone.  My hero!

Dead Ant - Dead Ant - Dead Ant.....

I still get the heevey jeeveys, and tend to think something is crawling on me, but overall I am stable and close to being fully recovered.  Gotta love camping life!