Sluggo gotta go go!!!

Sunday, 8 July
Well it never fails. Every base has presented itself with some sort or creature that freaks me out. Ellsworth had the plague of grasshoppers & jumping spiders. Robbins had the palmetto bugs. Ghedi had the centipedes & stink bugs & birds in basement & bats in the bedroom. Langley wasn’t to bad…I was used to the critters there - oh wait we had a mouse. Barksdale had BIG spiders, lizards, black widows, and other BIG ugly bugs I don’t know the names of. Now we are at Spangdahlem and although I have not found anything that has freaked me out yet, Madison has. It is a rather dangerous creature that varies in size from about 1 inch to 5 inches. It’s reddish brown and a bit scaly looking. The fierce critter moves at the speed of paint drying and it has no legs and I am pretty sure no teeth. It' name…Slug. Are they in our house? Nope. Did one land in Madison’s hair? Nope. Did one bite her, spit on her, touch her, look at her, or stick out it's tounge at her?...nope. All it did was lay there. In fact, it was laying there praying that Morgan wouldn’t step on it, and that Madison would stop screaming. Okay, so that was us praying about the screaming. She is deathly afraid of these dudes. Since it has rained for 3 weeks here, they are out in force.

Madison does not want to go outside and pretty much has a panic attack when I mention going for a walk. It probably doesn’t help that Morgan ripped up a toilet paper tube and threw it on the floor, then yelled “SLUG!!!” Tim (our sponsor) took us out to this great German restaurant called Torshanke (which we will be taking all who come to visit) and on the way home we walked through the town and then took a farm road home. Everyone was loving life and enjoying our long walk until we came to this wooded section of the road that was a little muddy, and wouldn’t you know, peppered with big honking slugs. I tell you what, you could have saddled some of these babies! I was walking along side Madison counting how many she had unknowingly walked past, how many of them she had stepped on, and praying she wouldn’t notice! When suddenly she screams! She is absolutely terrified of these things. Mark ended up carrying her the rest of the way, which was no small trek. Just when we came to the end of this road, Tim points up to the next road. Key word being UP. Madison was not yet over her fear, so Mark being the great daddy he is, carried her all the way up that hill. It was pretty steep, Morgan was commenting about her muscles working hard. Marks muscles were working more than any since he had an extra 44lbs tightly grasping around his neck. We eventually came to a clearing and there was a soccer field that paralled where we were walking. After convincing Madison that slugs do NOT play soccer, she and Morgan ran and ran all over the soccer field.

Poor slugs - I never knew they could be so dangerous!!!