Our vacation was officially ruined. It’s not just that being eaten by bedbugs is unpleasant. It is, and we got little sleep as a result. The biggest problem is that bedbugs love to travel, and you don’t want to spread them around, particularly not to your own home.
The first thing we needed to do was avoid contaminating our cars. If anyone wanted to go out, they needed to first treat their clothes, shoes, and anything else they wanted to bring with them. It was complicated enough that we basically only left to get necessities, such as drinking water. We had to sleep in the house at night and allow ourselves to be eaten. Ew.
But here is one way in which we got lucky. The owner decided to heat-treat the cottage. Heat treatment involves heating the structure up to 130-140 degrees and leaving it at that temperature long enough to kill everything inside. This process would treat everything in the cottage, including our luggage, computers, games, etc., all of which would have been difficult to treat otherwise. We are grateful that the owner decided to go that route. It was expensive (around $3,000!). He could have chosen something cheaper that would have left us high-and-dry, but he didn’t. He turned out to be a real stand-up guy.
There were two downsides for us, though. One is that treating large amounts of fabric items that way is not efficient, so we had to treat all of our clothing, towels, etc. by running them through the dryer on high heat, putting them in trash bags, and removing them from the premises. That’s how we spent all of Tuesday. We kept the cottage’s dryer running almost nonstop from early morning into the late night.
The other downside is that you can’t be in the structure while it’s cooking. So we had to plan to be out all day on Wednesday. Anything we wanted to bring with us had to be heat-treated in the dryer or saturated with rubbing alcohol. My memories of Tuesday are mostly of going up and down the stairs with laundry and the lingering smell of rubbing alcohol.
Wednesday morning, we each put on a fresh set of heat-treated clothing, and left the cottage. Once out, we were not allowed to go back in lest we recontaminate ourselves. Now all we had to do was keep ourselves busy until the pest control people were done with the heat treatment and the cottage had had a chance to cool off.