We went home to Wyoming for a week. I apologize on behalf of both of us if you feel slighted that we were not able to schedule some time to see you, but between caring for our parasites and visiting our 80 year old grandmother we really did not have a lot of free time. I didn’t even get to sew my new old-lady-couch-floral pattern skirt!
Also, thank you to everyone in the Craigslist world for being so wonderful, as we knew you would be. This is one of many listings that drew in the CLers like magic, and we appreciated all of your offers of help! Here is the post for all of you who may have missed it:
We spent a lot of our time at home admiring fall foliage. Well, I did at least. We spent 54 hours traveling from the Caribbean coast of Colombia to our home in Casper, Wyoming, and the temperature, climate, elevation, and seasons were such a shock to our systems that everything is still in a daze. (To be fair, when the sun comes out in Denver it is not actually that cold in autumn; we did spend an hour waiting at our fantastic cousin’s house for our ride north to WY by sunbathing in our south clothes.)
See? And that’s just out the front door at M’s house!
But mostly we were visiting our grandmother at her new apartment in an assisted living facility down the street from M’s house. I was gifted a new iPhone from an awesome benefactor (thanks D!) and was able to capture as many of the awesome Wyoming moments as I could. (I am not yet quick enough to remember to catch the really good ones, like the guy wearing a snake in the grocery store, or the Obama-supporting veteran driving an open-air-jeep-wearing-an-actual-bra-with-rocks-on-the-hood madness. Because who is ever ready for those moments?)
As a family we all converged on Carbon County to throw a shindig for “the old lady”, as our grandfather (lovingly?) calls our grandmother. She did fret a bit that no one would come to her party, being that it had already snowed this season and so many of her friends (that are still around) are winter homebodies. She quickly forgot to be nervous when we started discussing politics (our mother’s side of the family is full of strong independent women who have a tendency to vote blue), the gossip at her new apartment, and the weather. People in Wyoming can discuss the weather for hours. We made a brief stop at Independence Rock to use the wonderful roadside restroom (since there are few to no towns along most roads in the country of Wyoming, the state puts up well maintained rest facilities at local monuments or viewpoints).
We arrived in Sinclair, a town of about 200 people where M grew up. Our grandfather had worked the refinery (among an assortment of other jobs) and M had spent her early years running around with various cousins (we are related to a ridiculously high percentage of the people in Carbon County). The refinery house that our grandparents later purchased:
Please note the “vote independent” sign in the front yard. H and I spent a lot of time during our week visit seeing little local eccentricities like this and realizing how much it explains us. We spent the day watching Denver news (the only local Wyoming news is out of Casper, and that station is not available everywhere) where every commercial break had literally only political advertisements and maybe one car advertisement. Swing state fever has definitely set in! We couldn’t take it any longer and decided to play Pinochle for the rest of the night. If anyone knows how to play, let us know (it is my absolute favorite card game, and no one we meet seems to know how to play)!
We gathered at the local watering hole for the 80th birthday party, and chatted with our grandmother’s various friends and relatives (the line between the two is very blurred out there). Granddad got the immediate family to gather for a photo, which only took us about 30 minutes to get ourselves shuffled into place for the 20 minute photo session.
Good news is we were all giggling about how ridiculous this process always is.
We spent only 2 days in Rawlins/Sinclair, and then drove back up to Casper so G could take a flight back to Hawai’i. It was nice having a little sister time, but first thing the next morning we set in to dealing with our parasites. You see, ever since Cabo de la Vela, H and I have been dealing with insect bites that had stuck around too long and itch like crazy. Also, there are these interesting little trails of red that appear when the itching is unbearable. F, being the calming and nurturing parent that he is, told H that she had worms. Understandably, this little comment sent H to a level of irrational that is rare for her (not really for me, though). So to the doctor at Urgent Care we went, with our hope being that maybe we had scabies or some other easily treated bug.
Turns out, like everyone else we have asked over the past 3 weeks, the doctor had no idea what exactly we were carrying around. She did know that it was not scabies, but with the trails and itching and such it was definitely a little critter. Her best guess was Cutaneous Larva Migran.
At this point I had grown quite attached to my little friends. They had been with me for weeks and caused only minor annoyances in their time. I assumed that once they were through chewing on my skin, or whatever it is they were up to, they would simply move on to greener pastures. I mean, they hadn’t spread to more locations or caused open festering wounds. But once the doctor told us that they were indeed contagious I realized that if I was ever to be allowed into our tent again I would have to evict my uninvited travelers as well.
The treatments had various options: a simple medication that would turn the body into an inhospitable environment, pesticide on the skin, or treatments with liquid nitrogen. Our 100% deet was back in Colombia, so H voted for options 1 & 3 while I thought that option 3 followed by pesticides in Colombia should do the trick. So we picked up the medication and a few boxes of wart remover and headed home to burn our little friends away.
Wart remover. Not quite what we expected.
We did not take into account that the instructions on the box were for treating callused warts on the tough skin of the feet or hands, rather than fresh flesh we applied it to. We went a little overboard. We may (probably) have given ourselves some serious burns. I can say the pain of the sizzling skin was really nothing compared to the ache of the burn setting in during the hours that followed. And then the burns swelled with that yellowish healing fluid until it looked like we were lepers. Good news is it gave us a great opportunity to work on our crafts!
We have wounds healing, but we are back in Colombia looking for work. So if anyone hears about some income opportunities is Bogota or beyond, let us know!
H
G
R:
Rule #2: Don't Die. 
