Travel Tip #1: Avoid Bedbugs

I'm on the road for much of this month, and I'm trying to be mindful of some of the hazards of life away from home.

One of them is bedbugs. It's hard to know what lurks in any hotel room, from five star to darkest night. However, a little prudence can dodge the dreaded bedbug. A Time article discusses the unpleasant creature.

Bon voyage!

Bedbug Registry

If you're uptight about bedbugs, there's a website in which reports of critter sightings are duly noted. The site, http://bedbugregistry.com/, offers an Anglo-Saxon perspective on the pesty creatures, with maps featuring identification of alleged American, Canadian, and UK bedbug infestations. The champ, unsurprisingly, is the Northeastern United States, with the epicenter in New York.

Over the years, I've lived in a number of New York apartments. To satisfy my curiosity, I researched most of my former addresses. First candidate -- a Lower East Side apartment that featured a bathtub in the kitchen, a hole in the wall behind the tub, and hugged the adjacent abandoned building. It came up with a clean bill of health, so to speak. Phew.

Next up was a small Soho tenement apartment above a neighborhood social club. Clean again. Well, you can't say those very good fellas in the club weren't tidy.

Batting third was a Turtle Bay studio that I sublet for a year. Nada. No bugs.

Meanwhile, many of Manhattan's currently fashionable apartments, hotels, stores, entertainment venues, and offices come complete with a bedbug population. Despite official New York's best efforts to hush the bedbug story, another sighting in a high profile location emerges and makes the Internet or (far less likely) mainstream media rounds.

The irony in my digging on the Bedbug Registry are the ads that appeared on its search page. One ad linked to hotels.com. Another connected to Google information about travel packages to the Big Apple. A third offered information on nightly rates for stays in New York condos. Frankly, bedbug phobia would inspire me to book elsewhere for a relaxing vacation.

I'll just use the Bedbug Registry in my search.

Bedbug Defense Gadget

Bedbugs, which have been around longer than humankind, have received escalated attention in the past year or so. The cause of the sudden fuss was their infestation of Manhattan south of 96th Street. Until then, bedbugs were as remote to Manhattan's prosperous set as foreclosures and unemployment were. They were "other people's problems" until the unwanted creatures crossed the moat formed by the Hudson, East, and Harlem Rivers. Once their rampant appearances made Manhattan a problematic venue to visit and to shop, bedbugs suddenly became a "national issue." Smart minds were tasked to eliminate the pesky creatures before they ruined in New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's sleep.

One mechanical solution has recently reached the commercial marketplace. It's a vacuum that apparently doesn't bother with dirt or dust, but focuses on the dastardly bedbug. The gadget uses UV light to eliminate the bugs. The New York Times ran a brief story earlier this year on the $400 gadget. Think of it as a "must have" gadget in the city that has everything.

Cooties

I woke up this morning and watched a few minutes of a New York newscast. One of the broadcast's feature stories was a segment on the City's bedbug epidemic. Apparently, the most recent cootie episode took place at a movie theatre. It sounded quite unpleasant, especially as the creatures like to hitch hike on human skin, hair, and clothing.

I admit I'm intimidated by the notion of going to public venues in the City during the epidemic. I don't want bedbugs in my west-of-the-Hudson home. As a result, the idea of doing pleasurable things in New York, such going to the movies, almost seems out of the question.

This situation reminds me of Jeannie Chang. I made her acquaintance when I lived in Astoria during the Reagan Era. She had a couple of cautious habits which I still remember. One was to walk as far away as possible from construction sites. She believed objects would fall from the structures. I didn't quite buy into the strong version of her theory, until someone died from a falling object just a couple of blocks from where I was working at the time.

Jeannie also would not sit down on a subway train. In those days, homeless people, drug addicts, and others would use subway seats as their futons. Jeannie sized up the situation, and concluded the seats were cootie incubators. She preferred to stand.

I wonder how she would manage in today's bedbug ridden New York.