Back to Albuquerque…

Yesterday we got some packages from Amazon thinking we would make our lives easier, but it’s not at all what happened. Instead we got packages from Amazon that were contaminated with toxins that made us violently ill. The BLM (bureau of land management) land that we were so excited about that we had scoped out no longer felt good. We were in the process of moving from the Santa Fe national Forest to the wilderness, and stopped at the post office to pick up for Amazon packages. We tested them, and completely missed it. The boxes started to cause my thyroid to swell on the way, but we stopped and got rid of those as soon as possible. By the time we got to the wilderness, I was really sick. There’s just not a bonus when you have to dig a hole and aim. ?

We went back out of the wilderness and drove back up to where we had felt good the day before, but I kept feeling on and off bad. We couldn’t figure out what had changed. We ended up back into the wilderness and found a different place to camp for the night. I got the tent set up and then I threw the air mattress sleeping bags and bedding into the tent so that I could come back and get everything ready for us to sleep. After we finished eating dinner and I was done with the the bed together, I realized that the mobile laundry plunger washer thing that I got to help with laundry was super, super contaminated. My heart went nuts and I couldn’t even be within feet of this thing. The sad part is that it was sitting in the car right next to the air mattress which I had already thrown into the tent and blown up, and of course our bedding was touching it. The cross contamination definitely ruined the tent, the air mattress, the sleeping bags, blankets, and the sheets. It was OK timing on the tent because the door zipper was broken. I was half expecting to have a cow in the tent with us by morning because they were really curious about us, but Wesley realized if you zipped the door up instead of down the zipper held a little bit better. All of our clothes from when we went to pick up these packages were contaminated, and when they were put in the tote with the rest of the clothes that needed to be washed, they contaminated all them and the tote. Then there was the pepper sprays that got put into the miscellaneous tote that is now contaminated, and the Nitrile dish gloves that I got to protect my hands while doing laundry got put in a bucket with our zipper bags, which are also contaminated. The things that contaminated our world, the tent, and air mattress went back to Amazon and everything else got thrown in the dumpster on the way out of the wilderness. We are now in Albuquerque back at the hotel we started in and we got real showers for the first time in many days, which was amazing! We’re just taking a little break from camping to regroup. Below is a picture of some of the things that go eradicated from our lives today. The sad part is we still have a lot of stuff so part of the lesson one is that we clearly have too many things to lose over seven bags of stuff and still have quite a lot.