The alkaline hydrosis just seems too strange for me. I'd rather be composted. Give some bugs indigestion.

It was written on a bedspread in Pakbeng, Laos!

But, yes, we are. I never forget.

Jen saw the phrase "We in life lucky" in one of your journals. She mentions it sometimes.

That's a great video and song. Thank you, Jen.

Thanks Ron. You really understand what I'm trying to do in the journal. And you know I didn't decide to go home with Andrea simply because I discovered a "Lucky" printed on the bow of my glasses. But I did think it was pretty amazing since my first entry of the journal was about luck. And the first thing I saw in our very first room way back in Mandalay was the water bottle that came with the room that was Lucky brand water. An unplanned theme, just as luck is unplanned.

Obviously I knew what you ended up doing before I read this, but you still made it suspenseful and meaningful.

Nice jingle Ron! If I come up with a collapsable racket and team up with you jingle people I'm sure we will all become millionaires. What cyclist or camper not want one?

Skeetolene! I'd forgotten about that. I suggested that it was a product name that required a jingle, and Ron promptly composed one:

"Them skeeters gonna treat you mean ...
Don't worry none!
Get Skeetolene!"

Now .. if you can just invent a collapsible bug zapper racket with a jingle-ready product name, we'll come up with a jingle for you and we'll all make Million$!

We do carry a tiny bottle of DEET but I know I never used it and I think Andrea maybe used it a couple of times. In the 7-Elevens in Thailand they sell Skeetolene which is as good as DEET in my opinion. We only needed that sort of thing at dusk if we were eating outside and only around the ankles it seemed.

This racket weighs nothing, it's the size that is the problem. I wish it broke down into two pieces. It barely fits in the large pannier. It takes two AA batteries and that was a bit of a hassle because every day I had to remove them so that the racket wasn't activated constantly inside the pannier and also the batteries would go dead quickly. No big deal, just another thing I had to do every morning. I never needed to replace the batteries and we used it a lot. The racket worked great inside of every room. We killed hundreds of mosquitoes over the entire trip. We were able to get rid of every mosquito in the room before we went to sleep.

Best trip ever for no big bug bites. I think they are spraying the rooms more which we don't want them to do but we have no control. The rooms were cleaner overall than any previous trip.

Did you carry Deet or any other powerful bug repellent?

Any noteworthy bug bites?

I'm imagining myself at Camp Mosquito Cloud in Geraldine, MT .. running around maniacally with the Executioner Racket.

Whoa! If I were a mosquito, I would not mess with you.

How many do you think you killed?

And how much does that thing weigh?

This reminds me of a video I saw some years ago with the lyrics, 'Home is wherever I'm with you.'

https://youtu.be/L64c5vT3NBw

We carry spare tubes, patches, tire levers, etc. The wheels are 20", a common tire size for children's bicycles anywhere so possible to replace without too much drama although of course not the same quality as a Schwalbe Marathon Plus. On three trips we've had one flat, and that was a tube seam failure, not a puncture, and we've ridden over nails, bolts, glass, thorns, rusty metal slats, you name it.

I've got to ask: zero flats is great, but what did you carry just in case? What size are those wheels, and could you replace a tire if something disastrous happened to any of the four?

Thank you.