tick, tick, ACK!

July 20--Still the Soo

I slept pretty well, and Puck didn't wake me up, for some reason. Maybe the tapeworm, being dead, didn't make them hungry? I don't know. But I slept in a bit, and then fed the cats, and headed out on the town around 9am.

The campground is about a mile or so from town, so I got to see a bit of the place on the way. Including a HUGE very old hydroelectric plant, run on water from a canal (? maybe a stream) that runs from the Superior side to the Huron side, which means it drops 21 feet on the way, which makes quite a current, and which also makes downtown Sault Ste. Marie an island. I also walked by a couple of churches, plus a big tower that was made to commemorate missionaries, but now commemorates all the early explorers, and also gives people a great view of the land. Not me, since I'm afraid of heights and didn't want to pay money to be afraid.

Downtown I stopped in some of the small shops. The town itself appears to be dying; there are "For Rent/Sale" signs everywhere. However, they are also tearing up nearly all of the streets by the water, and I'm not sure why.

I hit some tourist traps (which are a bit higher-class crap than the usual traps), bought a couple of cheap books at the Salvation Army (I really need to get rid of some of the books I've read), and then headed to the locks.

What with security everywhere these days, you can't get anywhere near the locks or the canals except in the official (fenced-off) visitor area, and they searched my bag before they let me in. I did get to see a big freighter go through the locks, which was neat to watch. Seeing a huge ship looming over the canal walls, and then watching that ship sink to where you can't really see the deck. Very impressive.

Walking back, I tried to see the historic area, but that was what they were tearing up. So I did some bushwhacking and (probably) illegal cutting across construction zones with overgrown grass (more about that later), and managed to see most everything.

I also stopped at the public fishing pier, which gave me a great look at another freighter slowly making its way to the locks. Pretty damn big. And then I walked home, where I found the RV a bit warmer than I might like (the sun came out quite a bit) but the cats were fine.

I had been home an hour or so and was sitting on the dinette seat when I suddenly felt a tickle on my shoulder. So I went to scratch it, good primate that I am, and I felt something! I screeched a bit and grabbed it enough to fling it on the table, and found a big black tick! I suspect I picked it up while walking through the long grass, it got off on the dinette when I first came in, and then got back on me when I sat down again. I tried to squish it, but the damn thing kept coming back like some sort of zombie, so I flushed it down the toilet. Let it try to get back from there! I checked myself pretty thoroughly in the shower I just took, and I'll check my hair again as well as the cats a bit later (I doubt they have anything, unless it jumped off me and onto them). I'm also a bit jumpy now; I keep feeling that tick!

It did motivate me to do a cleaning, so now we have clean (well, clean-ish) floors and a clean litter box and I did the dishes. I also vacuumed the dinette seat. Damn ticks.

And we're going to have a nice thunderstorm now. We has a severe one go just to the south of us earlier; hopefully this one won't be too bad.