Sunday, July 08, 2007

Uninvited Guest


Waking up on our first morning in the Bohol Tropics Resort in Tagbilaran City, my daughter spotted the lovely insect above crawling on the floor of our room. I told my daughter to put the glass over it to trap it, and I thought it would make for a great picture. My wife, who is from Tagbilaran, told me that it is a large beetle called a bakukan.
After snapping the picture, I used one of my kids' coloring books to fling our uninvited guest off of the balcony.
There was a noticeable sag in the floor of our room, which resulted in there being a gap of up to one inch beneath the door to our room. I am guessing that the beetle crawled through the gap sometime during the night. The next two nights there I covered up the gap using one of the bathroom towels. Fortunately, we did not have anymore such uninvited guests.
My other complaint about Bohol Tropics was that in a rather novel but annoying way of economizing on space, they placed the bathroom sink inside the shower stall. That being said, the resort staff was always helpful and exceedingly polite.

5 comments:

Andrea said...

holy crap, i would've completely lost it...bugs are my enemy :(

Stardust said...

And to think I was upset by a few gnats at our Motel 6 we stayed at in Williamsburg in May!

Your bug friend looks like the size of the bugs in Arkansas where we lived for nearly two years when we were first married (hubby was stationed in Little Rock with the USAF). I didn't go out much during those years and we had a large supply of RAID, nets and swatters. Sometimes a large boot or shovel was necessary.

Fiery said...

You set it free? Free to make more of those????

ARGH!!!! ICK ICK ICK ICK

Tommykey said...

Fiery, I was afraid that if I tried to kill it I would only make it angry with me.

I had another bug adventure a couple of nights earlier at Mia and Stuart's house in Cebu. There was a blackout in the area for a couple of hours, and when the power came back on, I spotted a large roach on the window screen in the stairway.

Because the stairs descended below the screen, it was impossible to reach the giant roach, even with a broom. Mia insisted on trying to kill it, so I came up with the idea of filling a cup with water and throwing it at the roach. If all went according to plan, the roach would fall to the floor and Mia could then dispatch it with her slipper.

So, I filled up a cup with water and tossed it at the roach. The first toss missed, so I filled the cup again and tossed it. This time I hit my mark, and the roach started to fall. But then, to my consternation, rather than continuing to fall, the roach began to fly, directly towards me!

I cried out and fell to the floor, and the roach flew past me... into the bedroom in which my wife and kids were sleeping! Mia and I looked but were unable to find it, and I had to spend the night sleeping in that room and hoping it would not attack me. Fortunately, it was not seen again.

Joe said...

In the RV world, the sink in the bath is called a "wet bath." This saves space in a smaller rig. Not only am I an atheist/agnostic, but I RV as well. And that's your tidbit from Joe for the day!