Welcome...to Hell...

We didn't want to trump Mara's white coat ceremony post below (if you haven't seen it check it out first, this story takes a while to tell), but we found a reason to hate it here...ticks. We've had ticks in the past, in Milwaukee's parks, and we've had literally hundreds of them when we backpacked at Copper Falls State Park, but this trumps them all.

We went on a nice hike on a drizzly day here, but we wanted to be outside, and also to check out the trails at Thousand Hills State Park. We found a trail that is seldom used (evident by the dozens of LARGE spider webs we walked through). After about 3 miles the trail came to one of the "fingers" of Forest Lake. We through a stick for Lucy, and really enjoyed the view below:

We noticed some spots on our legs that we thought were seeds, pollen, or whatever. Upon further inspection Mara said "They're moving". At this point I started to freak out. We were about 3 miles from the car, and our legs & shoes were absolutely covered with these things. It reminded me of my sister Jen's experience with the red ants in North Carolina. Her feet were white with bites and swollen. We were not in any pain, but the thought of the things were making our legs itch like crazy! We made the trip back to the car in about a 1/3 of the time it took us to get to the lake. I took my shoes off, which was a mistake, and saw that there were even more than I imagined, all clumped up around my sock line...I started to mini-hyperventilate. We briefly thought of the part in Tommy Boy when Chris Farley is running around, hitting his head, yelling "BEES! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE! SAVE YOURSELF! YOUR WEAPONS ARE USELESS AGAINST THEM!"

We luckily made it back home quickly and both took showers with our dog's flea & tick shampoo. It seems to kill most of them. We found a couple of dead adult bugs, and confirmed that, yep, they were ticks.

We then gave the dogs a bath with it, and then we took another shower, still picking little ticks off (most of them were dead). We thought we were out of the woods. We were wrong. We went and ran some errands. When we came back we decided to cut the burrs out Linus' hair. This is what we found:

Literally, there are probably thousands of them on Linus alone. Luckily we found a vet that would see us at 4:30 on a Sunday. They are going to give them a flea "dip", and hopefully it will take care of them within 24-48 hours.

We feel SO BAD for our dogs! We talked to Chris & Shell about it, and we looked up websites that state "August 6, 2007; Missourians Urged to Protect Against Tick Bites as Tick-borne Disease Cases Increase". That is great.

We really don't hate it here now, but we will have to be extra-vigilant about checking our dogs (and our selves) for ticks. Oh yeah, we saw a HUGE spider on our walk too...

We'll let you know how our dogs fair after this mini-crisis we are in the midst of...