A couple weeks ago, we woke up to the worst infestation of ants we’ve ever had. We’ve only had a few (and only once before in the RV) but wow, this was a doozy. We’d moved to a new park the night before, and I guess they thought we were a new food truck rolling into town.
We discovered them when we opened the pantry to make breakfast the next morning. The ants were everywhere. They marched right up the rear jack beneath the pantry, and found an entry point. They were also entering through the front door, but that must’ve been very new because they hadn’t reached any food yet. They were just wandering aimlessly.
The pantry in the RV is quite large, and it was full. We lost about $100 worth of food. We’d become a little lax about the types of open packages that stayed in the pantry. As a general rule, we keep open packages of sweets (sugar, chocolate chips, etc) in the pantry unless it’s in an outer container with an airtight seal. But we’d recently started storing open sunbutter and nut butter in the pantry, and the ants were psyched. (In hot weather, we kept it in the fridge to keep it from going rancid too soon, but it’s so nice and cool in Crescent City that we stopped doing that about a week earlier. Oops.) Ever since the celiac diagnosis, wasting food hits harder. Gluten-free food isn’t cheap, and it can be really hard to find.
Our weekend plans were decided for us: deep clean the pantry and the whole RV, and prevent the ants from coming back inside. At least it was a good excuse to reorganize the pantry. It looks so nice now!
Siete saw our Instagram post about the whole ordeal and sent us a sweet message with an offer to help refill our pantry.
They sent all these chips!! They were even kind enough not to send anything with tomato, since I’m allergic. And as an exciting twist: I’ve never actually had salt and vinegar potato chips. David loves them, but they’re hard to find gluten-free (at least not GF enough for me).
OMG, y’all. Siete salt and vinegar potato chips are the BEST. My new favorite chips! There’s a little Serrano pepper in there, too, so there’s a tiny bit of heat. They are SO GOOD.
And back to the ants: we hated to do it, but we sprayed ant repellant at the points of entry in the RV, and put down bait poison on each of our leveling jacks. Our site was home for many anthills and they were climbing up our jacks (and the one jack under the pantry in particular), so we hoped to deter them from coming inside and encourage them to snack elsewhere. It worked: we didn’t have another ant inside for the rest of the week, and when we hitched up to leave, there were plenty of ants on the ground beneath the rig.
So that’s the story of how a sad RV life moment turned into the discovery of our new favorite snack.