After a night of such heavy and unrelenting rainfall I couldn’t imagine that there was any more water left in the sky but sure enough when we woke in the morning it was still chucking it down. Puddles in the yard where like duck ponds, water was throwing itself over the overloaded gutters, the nearby river water was advancing dangerously close to the cottage and the black clouds over the hills draped menacingly like an axeman’s hood. It looked very much like it was going to be anther very long day.
Kim put a life jacket in the back of the car and drove five miles to Bala for shopping essentials and came back with the bad news that there were warning lights flashing on the dashboard. If it had been a hire car then I wouldn’t have bothered but this was mine. I checked it our myself and it seemed to be a problem with the catalytic converter and as it was only an orange rather than a red light I chose to ignore it.
Shortly after breakfast I had a beer!
We were expecting Sally and the grandchildren to arrive sometime around midday but at two o’clock she phoned to say that she was hopelessly lost and her SatNav wasn’t working, things were going from bad to worse. She eventually arrived at about four o’clock and it took her and the children about five minutes to rearrange the accommodation into the way they like it – rather like Belgium in 1940 after the German Panzer divisions had passed through on the way to France.
As we sat around feeling sorry for ourselves there was rain, more rain and then more rain and then a thunderstorm and the electricity disappeared for a moment or two, the sky was black, prospects were black and our mood was black to match. To cheer ourselves up we lit the wood burner stove and sat around it and lamented a completely wasted day. The children couldn’t go outside and this was almost as bad as being trapped in a car in a queue at the ferry terminal which was exactly the situation that I had changed holiday arrangements just to avoid.
Just after evening meal something unexpected happened. Jonathan spotted it first – a patch of blue, Blue, BLUE and miraculously the clouds suddenly parted as though Moses himself was crossing the Red Sea, the sun came out and the yard puddles started to steam, the flood waters began to retreat and we were able at last to go outside in the fresh air.
It stayed fine now for the remainder of the evening but it was nearly dinner time and too late to go out anywhere but we enjoyed the rest of the day under clear skies and hoped that this would continue into tomorrow.
We went to bed but sometime about one o’clock Kim woke me to say she could hear something – something fluttering. I told her she was imagining things and that she should go back to sleep but then I heard it too. A gentle quivering high in the beams, probably a moth I reassured myself but then Kim demanded man action so I got out of bed and turned on the light. Oh My God it was a bat. A bat. A bloody bat!
It was quite happy flying about in the blacked out room but the light send it into a delirious panic and it began to swoop about the room and jump from beam to beam and Kim started to shriek. The commotion woke the whole house and soon everyone had joined us to see what the fuss was about and still it flew madly around the room and once or twice got dangerously close I feared.
From under the shelter of the duvet Kim kept shouting ‘get rid of it, get rid of it!’ and I was doing my best but as anyone who has ever had a bat in their bedroom in the middle of the night will know this is much easier said than done. I was still half asleep and although I am in peak physical condition the creature was a whole lot faster than me. There were various suggestions ranging from catching it in a fishing net to throwing a towel over it but it was moving so quickly that all of these suggestions were completely useless. Sally insisted that I do nothing which might endanger its life. Jonathan went back to bed.
My one and only idea was to open the window and hope that it would find its own way out and in a huge slice of good fortune that is exactly what happened and it suddenly disappeared into the ink black sky. Kim calmed down and I cheered her up by telling her that not everyone can say that they have spent the night with Batman. Before I went back to sleep I checked my neck in the bathroom mirror for vampire bites because I didn’t want to be responsible later for sending my grandchildren to join the undead with a well intentioned good morning kiss.
There is a lot of folklore and old wives’ tales about bats such as:
- It’s lucky to keep a bat bone in your clothes.
- Keeping the right eye of a bat in your waistcoat will make you invisible
- Carrying powdered bat heart will stop a man bleeding to death
- Washing your face in the blood of a bat enables you to see in the dark.
I have to say that I like the idea of being invisible!
It is also said that a bat in the house means that it is haunted and the ghost has let it in but I will leave that story for a future post. Finally on this point, stories say that if a bat flies into the house then it is going to rain and right now that seemed the most plausible explanation for the intrusion.
Have anyone else ever had an unwelcome visitor in the bedroom? Try and keep it clean!
What an adventure!
I like those sketches, who is the artist?
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I am afraid I don’t know, they are scanned from some coasters that I bought somewhere. Funny aren’t they?
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They’re terrific! I thought they were up on your walls somewhere …
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They are too good to be used as drinks coasters that’s for sure.
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Great story, Andrew. I once had a gecko in my bed.
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A gecko would definitely freak Kim out!
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Made me laugh. Great story.
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Thanks for reading!
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Well – you are the first person I’ve ever heard of having a bat in the bedroom!! You should be telling this one into your older years, eh?
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I will be telling that story for some time that’s for sure.
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A good read over my lunch!
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and to my relief that was the end of the rain…
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Oh I laughed hysterically at the scene Andrew. Good idea with the open window! My sister in law in California once had a mouse in her bedroom . She went to fetch their cat to take care of it and found a skunk in her kitchen. It had come in through the cat door. She returned ot her bedroom where the mouse seemed like the least of her worries. the skunk eventually wandered back out after having a nice snack from the cat dish.
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A skunk! That would be an unwecome visitor. I once had a wasps nest in the attic and I have had trouble with mice – https://aipetcher.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/the-mouse-trap/
but lukily we don’t get too many skunks in Lincolnshire UK!
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Whew!
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Bats in the walls making noise all night during my stay in Belize! Misery for a light sleeper!
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Creepy too I imagine!
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A little bit. But at some point the bats have kept you up so long you don’t care if they land on your pillow or not as long as they quit moving and be quiet.
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While on holiday in Australia, I felt something move under the covers… a cockroach in the bed – yuck!
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I hate cockroaches. Found one in a hotel room in Croatia but thankfully not in the bed!
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This is a great story! I’m starting to believe that travel is not so much about the destination as the crazy stories you get to tell afterwards 🙂 The most unwelcome visitor or visitors I’ve had in my room are bloodthirsty mosquitos, which whine in your ear and leave you bumpy and itchy. Horrible! Also, I was recently staying in a hostel in Lima where one of the staff members barged into my dorm room at midnight to ask one of my roommates for some “wacky tobacky”.
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I hate mosquitoes but luckily for me if I am with Kim then they they seem to have a definite preference for her blood over mine.
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It is the same with my wife, Irina. Therefore I always take her with me 🙂
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Pingback: On This Day and Bother with a Bat | Have Bag, Will Travel
No, but I have had a rainy holiday in Wales.
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Bats live in our barn . Over the years we’ve had three bats in our house. The first appeared from nowhere and began swooping around the room as we were watching television. Like you did, we opened the windows. I can only assume it had come down the chimney.
The second time we found a dead one on the floor of the hall! The third time we found the bat in the dining room, again on the floor but alive. Daughter Louisa located a bat hospital/rescue centre just a few miles away – Who knew! Apparently, the bat was dehydrated; a few days later it was released up here in the fields to find its way back to the barn and the colony.
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Thanks for adding your story Sue.
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My pleasure, you brought back memories I’d completely forgotten about.
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I once had a bat in my hotel bedroom and opening all the windows eventually got rid of it but it was quite scary.
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Do you remember the Old Wives Tail about them getting tangled in your hair?
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No, and it didn’t fortunately because, if it had, my screams would’ve woken all the other guests.
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Great story. Here is an answer to your question: https://derrickjknight.com/2012/09/03/bats/
Our house was said to be haunted, but that is another story.
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This reminds me of the cricket behind the old, very solid (and far too heaving to move with just one person) wardrobe when I lived in Provence. To this day I have no idea how the damn thing got there, but I couldn’t persuade it out and the only way to shut it up was to switch the lights on… and with the lights on I couldn’t sleep because it was too bright, and with the lights off I couldn’t sleep because it was too noisy.
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I wonder what is the life span of a cricket? How long would you have to put up with it?
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I have no idea. It made its way out sometime during the following day. I was very glad to be shot of it, especially as that summer was the onw where the local magpie population would wake me up as soon as it was light by shouting at the neighbour’s cat from the roof of my porch.
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So, I was immediately reminded of this (skip to the last minute or so if you want to see how they capture it) . . .
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The link didn’t work!
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Dang! . . . it’s a clip from The Office (US version) about a bat in the office.
You could try to search on YouTube over there, but it could be it’s a copyright issue or licensing issue to show it there.
Sorry.
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OMG. I am dying. That clip is hilarious.
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A friend who lives in the country, and might therefore be expected to be more relaxed about these things, had a bat fly into her dining room when we were visiting once. She and the other person there started screaming hysterically and locked themselves in the bathroom. The bat was clinging to the curtains so John and I trapped it under a Tupperware dish, slid the lid underneath and deposited it outside. Nae panickin’!
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What a hero!
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Andrew sometimes I forget how friggin funny you can be. This post is awesome. Your descriptions of the rain, “rearranging accommodations,” being trapped in a queue at the ferry terminal, to a night of bat chaos. Whew. Gonna have to wash my face in bat blood to face this kind of catastrophe in the future.
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Thanks for that.
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Great story! And a great way to use a travel blog when travel for pleasure is as risky as bats in the bedroom. (Bats harbour diseases that can leap to humans…) I once had a scorpion in my bed, hiding from a typhoon in Japan. It stung me, of course.
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Thanks for adding your story.
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