Gnats and Whatnot

Pine Island RV Park

This week we're on the Gulf side of Florida.

From Miami, we crossed Gator Alley to the Ft. Myers area and stayed for four days at an RV park on Pine Island, a little west of Cape Coral. Cape Coral is, for all intents and purposes, a giant marina-- a place where you can purchase a home with a dock, pretty much anywhere. It's set up with canals that resemble city streets, all of which connect in a sort of grid to the open water. St. James City, at the south end of Pine Island, is much the same. Our RV park, however, was situated in a rather dismal spot near the center of the island, with no access whatsoever to the water, and no public beaches anywhere to be found. Its only redeeming feature was a large saltwater swimming pool that we made use of a couple times. And they did put us in a fairly spacious site.

On our final day at Pine Island, we took the bikes out for a ride into St. James City, at the southern end of the island (looking for a beach, of course)-- a six mile round trip. It was good exercise, but that's about it.

If nothing else, we're discovering, for our next trip to Florida, which RV parks we don't want to stay at.

Did you know that gnats bite? Well, I didn't until recently. While Mark was loading the bikes back onto the rack and hooking up the trailer, he was bitten by gnats. "Gnats don't bite," I informed him--"It must have been something that looked like a gnat...couldn't have been a gnat."

However, after looking up biting gnats on the trusty internet, I found that indeed, some gnats DO bite! Live and learn.

So, Mark pulled out the essential oil bug-bite salve that I keep on hand, which works wonderfully well on mosquito bites, and rubbed it into his bites. It wasn't helping. We did some more research and learned that apple cider vinegar, coupled with thyme essential oil, is helpful. A few minutes later I had whipped up a vial of "gnat bite" solution. He rubbed it into his bites...again...and again. And again.

Mark's "gnat bites"...posted with permission.

Curiously, those half a dozen or so original gnat bites had turned into dozens of "gnat bites" all over his body-- legs, arms, neck. How, I asked him, is he getting more and more gnat bites, in the house, where neither of us have actually seen any gnats whatsoever?...and they are bothering only him? I have zero gnat bites. (It reminded me of the time, decades ago, where my young son found himself covered with "mosquito bites"... that turned out to be chicken pox.)

Now, I don't know everything...obviously; I didn't know that gnats bite. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that gnat bites don't spread. He might have encountered a few biting gnats in the weeds behind the coach, but I suspect he encountered something else as well...perhaps a patch of poison ivy or poison oak? Whatever it was, my poor husband is currently in itch-hell-- a misery we've probably all encountered in one form or another sometime in our lives. We're treating with calamine lotion, and in three weeks or so he should be back to normal...we're praying that it heals up sooner than that!

This week we're in Palmetto, just south of Tampa. Yesterday we drove about forty-five minutes looking for a public beach that actually had parking near it. The water was chilly, but Mark ventured in anyway. I was content to bury my feet in the soft sand. If the weather holds out (we have three days of rain in the forecast), we'll try to return at least once before heading back to Gainesville.

I've been noticing a particular evergreen tree since we've been in Florida that I've been trying to identify, almost to the point of obsession. There was a tall beautiful tree of this variety in Pine Island. Arborday.org has a sort-of-useful site that helps you identify what kind of tree something is by its leaves. I say "sort of useful" because it wasn't useful at all in this case. Determined to solve the riddle I continued to google "evergreen leaf images" with no success. Finally I gave up. Then, as if Nature was egging me on, when we pulled into our site here in Palmetto, lo and behold, planted in the site right next to ours was another smaller version of this same tree! Back I went to the internet, hunting through images...and finally today I found it!

Norfolk Pine

Satisfaction is such a good feeling!