Tortoise on the trails and other surprising things

Recapping another stint of American adventures

It’s Friday morning and I’ve got a surprise day off work after the course I was delivering this week got cancelled last week. I’m in a coffee shop in North Carolina, the two men sitting next to me are having a fairly intense conversation for 7am about feeling Jesus in their hearts and I’ve got a lot of very itchy big bug bites. They’ve flared up in big angry welts all over my legs and my back and my arms and I’m doing a lot of that ‘itching around the source’ strategy to try and get some relief. I’m not sure how they got to my back when my top was tucked into my shorts. But in they got, somehow.

I’m not sure who ‘they’ are. Mosquitos? Big, angry horse flies? Something else? Hard to say.

I seem to have always been especially tasty to bugs, which I guess I could take as a compliment. When I hiked the Cumbria Way with Tanne in 2021, we walked every single step together and used the same insect repellant, and I finished with somewhere in the region of 104 bites (I counted) and I think she …