The Slaying of an Aggressive Predator

Although Hawaii was absolutely fabulous, we did have a not-so-great time our first morning there. It began really early when the neighbors upstairs let their alarm go off for over an hour really early in the morning, I think it was about 5am-ish. I managed to doze through most of it. However I was jerked into consciousness when I felt the slight tickle of something moving up my arm near my shoulder. I glanced toward my arm and saw a dark blob about an inch and a half long (my eye sight wasn't exactly the best without my glasses on). In one swift move I gasped from being startled that it was there, sat up quickly and flicked it away from me. This immediately brought my two travel companions to full alert. Andrea was sleeping next to me and wanted to know what happened. Erica came running in from the next room with the same questioning face. It was a cockroach. Eww. I felt violated. And the worst part was I didn't see where it had gone, so all we knew was the fact that there was one lurking around our bedroom.

I was done being in bed at this point and got up. I felt gross. But our morning surprises were not over.

Within a couple minutes I turned around to see Andrea leaping out of bed grabbing the blankets with her to reveal the ugliest thing ever. A 5 inch long centipede scurrying over our mattress!! Andrea is no girly-girl and can handle bugs, but apparently not things with that many legs. I immediately dove into my luggage and pulled out one of my hiking shoes. Armed with shoe in hand I flicked the pest off our bed and onto the floor where I proceeded to introduce it to its doom. A good 5 or 6 hard whacks later and it finally stopped moving.

I'm sorry to say I did not think about getting a picture of it at the time. All I wanted was for it (and every other bug) to get as far away from me as possible. However I did find a similar looking picture online. My apologies for posting something so hideous on my blog, but really you need to see it to know how gross this was. This... was in our bed.


Later on we read in our guidebook about these centipede's where it labeled them as an "aggressive predator". It also said if bitten the victim will feel excruciating pain for several hours, possibly as painful as a gun shot wound.

Eww and eww again.

I can handle bugs, but I can't handle them in my bed with me.