Indiana Jones and the Exurbs of Doom

It's no big secret that I enjoy close-up photography of insects and arachnids. This past weekend I had a great opportunity to get some great shots of myriad creatures. My family got together for our annual New Braunfels tubing trip. It's a chance for all 16 (+/- friends and new significant others brave enough to come) of us on my maternal side to be extremely loud and unquestionably humorous (to us anyway) for the weekend at my aunt and uncle's house.

A couple of years ago my aunt and uncle moved into a bigger house on a few acres out in the country, mainly due to the rowdiness of my family when we descend on their home laden with coolers of beer and gallons of liquor. The suburbs just couldn't contain us. I've mentioned their homestead previously regarding my uncle's mower-proof thistle patch. This place has some of the largest and strangest bugs that I have ever seen in person not behind glass or on a movie screen. I will never again watch cheesy action movies with cliche scenes where someone has to reach in a dark hole filled with unrealistically large bugs in the same way, because now I know that bugs do actually get unrealistically large.

Travis feeding Eva before saddling her up and riding her around

You may initially look at this picture and think that I've gone insane since the animal being fed by Travis here is not actually a bug. She is a semi-tame deer named Eva, one of the numerous deer roaming this neighborhood. There is actually a large bug in the picture though. If you look behind Trav on the wall of the garage, you can see it.

Unidentified horrifying insect

Here we have a close-up of the bug and its really disgusting face. At some point it flew off as we were sitting on the porch, and I mistook it for a hummingbird. So yeah, it's a large bug, not to mention hideous. It's like a cross between a moth and an alien.

Scorpions have evolved the perfect camouflage
for their natural habitat, berber carpeting

Travis also had an encounter with this "little" guy in the living room. He ran right across Trav's foot. Fortunately, Travis didn't realize what it was as it happened, because he would have had a heart attack.

Speaking of terrifying arachnids, this tarantula heard a few of us having a collegial and enlightened discussion on education reform (that's actually what my family talks about when we're really drunk, and I'm not joking) at 2am and decided to join in. I found this bug to be the most disturbing one we saw all weekend, mainly because of his outrageous views.

This tarantula has a lot of ideas
when it comes to the state of science education in Texas

I think that's enough for one day, but rest assured, I have more. Maybe tomorrow I'll show them if I can't think of anything else in the morning.