OK. This is it. All of our blog posts to this point have been at least rosy or somewhat so in one way or another. And know there’s this one. Brutal honesty.

“They” say that it’s always best to accentuate the positive. If there’s nothing good to say then don’t say anything. But then, that doesn’t really tell the whole story, does it?

The scenery in this part of the world IS beautiful beyond words. And then there’s the bugs.

It’s probably no secret that there is no love lost between myself and mosquitos. They love me (or at least my blood) but the feelings are definitely not mutual.

The hard and brutal truth is that when you travel in this part of the world you pretty much have to choose to travel in cold and darkness (winter) or you can travel in warmth and swarms of bugs (summer). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or in some cases, like this one, it might help if you’re NOT a rocket scientist) to realize that if you want to avoid the cold, that you’re going to have to embrace (or at least tolerate) the bugs.

So here we are. In northern British Columbia and on the verge of entering the Yukon and the bugs are EVERYWHERE!

Our van is fine. We’ve got mosquito netting where we need to so our sleeping areas are still sacred. The problem is that the rest of the world — and the part that we came to see — is OUTSIDE of the van.

It’s worse because the mosquitos seem to love to chomp into Quinn. His legs look like a red mountain chain of bug bites. He won’t wear long sleeves or pants and the mosquito repellant and citronella seem to be useless in the face of these mosquitos. Here, we are the amateurs and THEY are the pros.

The current quest (at least from my standpoint) is to continue to head north until the temps drop low enough at night that the bugs go away. Word has it that the mosquitos are usually only active in this part of the world until mid-August. It is now August 13th and the high today was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. We came close to a frost a few weeks ago in Banff NP, but it seems like it’ll be a LONG time before we will have a frost here or anywhere near here.

Yesterday, I thought about those yogis that meditate while bees swarm around them. Maybe I need to do something like that, except with mosquitos. Then, perhaps, I will be one with nature, instead of the one-who-does-anything-and-everything-to-avoid-bugs (especially those than bite)! Stay tuned to find out who dominates on this trip — the mosquitos or us!

P.S. The weather report says it’s supposed to snow in Inuvik, our next major stop, on Thursday. Maybe that will finally mean the end of the little buggers.