Hiking bug left couple feeling itchy

Pardon me if I’m fidgety.

I itch.

I really itch.

With summer winding down, my wife and I have tried to get one last great bite of the great outdoors in warm weather.

At the same time, the great outdoors has gotten one last great bite — make that bites — of us.

It started innocently enough.

On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, though the mercury was somewhere in the 90s, we decided to take a hike. Connie’s internet sleuthing located Greenville Falls, a Miami County park near Covington, Ohio.

Greenville Creek, which runs east from Indiana through Greenville, Ohio, actually has a pretty good waterfall there, good enough in fact that in the late 1890s it was the site of a hydroelectric plant.

The falls provides a pretty backdrop, and the hiking is modest and easy. It turned out to be a good spot for a picnic lunch.

Fair enough, but on Labor Day we pushed things too far.

After packing a lunch, we headed north up to Geneva, then on to the little village of Ceylon, past the covered bridge to the Rainbow Bottom.

It’s a place where the Wabash River makes a wide bend. In the springtime and other periods of high water, it’s completely flooded.

Then when the water level drops, the Wabash leaves behind a series of ox bows, stranded bits of forgotten river.

Those ox bows, it should be noted, are pretty much stagnant. And as such, they are breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

That should have been our first clue, but we’d had such a good time on the Sunday hike that we paid no attention.

There’s parking for about two cars at the Rainbow Bottom trailhead, but that wasn’t a problem.

We were the only people on the face of the earth foolish enough to think about taking a hike around that particular section of mosquito-infested bottomland in 90 degree weather.

At least we had the place to ourselves.

We soon found out why.

While clouds of grasshoppers buzzed around at knee-level, it was the mosquitoes that began to make themselves known, not at first but progressively so that about halfway through the hike we were doing more swatting and swinging than anything else.

There’s nothing like mosquitoes when it comes to demolishing any attempt to commune with nature.

Those pastoral, thoughtful, scenes you might have hoped to conjure up never materialize.

They were in our eyes, they were biting our ears, and they seemed to have sent out a call to every other mosquito in a 50-mile radius.

We’d sprayed ourselves with insect repellant, but that only seemed to make the bugs more aggressive.

Midway through the hike, the mosquito problem was at its worst. By then, there was little choice but to plug on and make our way back to the car.

Later, having a bug-free picnic near the covered bridge at Ceylon, we started to assess the damage.

And there was plenty of it: Bites in places we’d never had bites before.

In some places, it looked as if we’d come down with measles.

Next time we hike Rainbow Bottom, there will be snow on the ground.

Frostbite maybe, but no mosquito bites.