Swimming with leeches

Get it off! Get it off!

Yes, I swam with those blood sucking creatures.*

Over one summer weekend my friend invited me to go camping in Lake Powell with her family. We loaded the car and headed out. We drove a lengthy five hours to the lake. We pulled in around three in the afternoon. The sun was beaming down and the water felt warm and refreshing. We loaded the house boat and cruised away.

Lake Powell at its finest (Courtesy of: House Boat Rental Lake Powell Utah)

Once we found a spot we unloaded, set up tents and went to bed. The next day my friend and I decided to go set our hammocks up somewhere. We got our hammocks, drinks, music and a speaker and went for a hike. We wandered up the red rocks for a long time looking for a good spot. At first we walked next to the lake so we jumped in here and there. We saw a cluster of big trees ahead so we walked toward them. Once we got there we discovered a whole line of trees along a crack in the rock. We decided it was a nice place to hammock so we set them up and swung the day away. Once the sun set we headed back to camp but we left our hammocks there.

The next morning we hiked back up to our special place. It was a blazing hot day and the sun was high in the sky. Once we reached our hammocks we looked up the crack in the rocks and found many small ponds with water in them. They were like rock hot tubs all in a line from the run off. We were super excited because we were incredibly hot. We dipped our feet in the water and decided it was the perfect temperature.

We grabbed our music and speaker and brought it over. We jumped in.

The water felt so refreshing. Until…

I felt a strange back slimy thing under my foot. At first I thought it was just a rock with algae on it so I didn't say anything.

A few more minutes passed.

All the sudden, my friend started shrieking.

I didn't understand at first until she lifted her foot and I saw a leech stuck to her heel.

I started screaming at the top of my lungs. We both got out as fast as we could and pulled them off with twigs nearby.

We slowly started to recover and checked the rest of our body to make sure they weren’t on us. Thank god, we could find any others.

If you don’t know what a leech looks like you don’t want to. Basically they are small slimy blood sucking creatures. They enjoy living in moist environments and like to attach themselves to other creatures and suck their blood.

In the end we were okay so we took our hammocks down and went back to the camp.

*GOT YOU! I made this entire story up because I have a bad case of writers block. Mr. Parker told me to write about the weirdest place I have ever been swimming and the worst I could come up with was an ocean. Sorry you just wasted your life sucker. (Get it)

Happy Make Believe,
~Corrine