Naomi and I headed to Sea Rim State Park, near Port Arthur and the Texas/Louisiana border, to say farewell to 2024 and welcome in 2025. We had never been to this park before; when I made the reservation the website mentioned “mosquitoes are active year round”. In all our years of camping, we have never seen this many mosquitoes EVER.
After arriving and getting the camper set up, we spent the evening killing as many mosquitoes as we could find in the camper. And there were a LOT. For every one we swatted, three more seemed to take its place. Naomi remarked on the similarity to Gimli and Legolas at Helm’s Deep; we should have had a similar competition to theirs!
I figured that maybe it was due to having the camper open while we did our setup, and it might be better on the second night. Nope. If anything, it was worse. For about an hour after sunset, we were smearing the ceiling and walls of the camper with mosquito guts (and some of our blood).
So the following morning I set out to determine how these little flying bloodsuckers were getting in the camper. It didn’t look to be the ceiling vents. The door and windows didn’t seem to have significant gaps that they could get in. Maybe the exhaust vent for the fridge or the heater? Unlikely but possible. How about around the slide out? The rubber seal around the top and sides looked fine. How about underneath? AHA! Where the slide out motor and track were, there was a large gap in the rubber seal. Where did it lead? Directly into the camper, underneath the sofa. A superhighway for mosquitoes to invade our living space.
We’ve been camping for over 15 years with our travel trailer and we never noticed this particular “feature” that not only made this week’s mosquito apocalypse possible, but also made keeping the interior of the camper a comfortable temperature a challenge. I suddenly feel like I need to apologize to my children for that miserable winter night in subzero temps camping in Flagstaff Arizona a decade ago. It finally makes sense now.