Things that go Bump… or Chirp! in the Night
I haven’t been able to sleep very well the last couple of days. Why is it that whenever the smoke detectors start chirping because the battery on one if them has gone dead, it always happens in the middle of the night? And why is it that the chirping always stops by the time you run downstairs with your heart in your throat ready to either put out a fire or kill whatever is making that awful sound? Many times there isn’t even an indication of which of the darn things is malfunctioning. It’s as if whoever designed these things had a very twisted sense of humor.
Okay, so I’m a light sleeper and, once I wake up startled, it takes me a long time to go back to sleep. That is why whenever I go on a trip one of my biggest fears is being able to get a good night’s sleep. In my pessimistic mind’s eye I always imagine a litany of potential disasters that could keep me awake at night thus ruining the trip, form lumpy mattresses to mosquitoes to extreme heat to gunshots from the coup attempt down the street.
So you see, despite all my bravado and my big dreams of ambitious expeditions, I am a wimp when it comes to loosing sleep. Luckily, when I’m on vacation, I almost always seem to sleep much better than when I’m at home. This could be because I’m always much more tired when I’ve been out all day sightseeing or doing whatever. During our month-long Europe trip, I can recall very few nights when I was unable to sleep other than the first few jet-lagged days and a night when a bus of rowdy teenagers parked next to our van. When you considered that were often out from 8:00 am sometimes until well after 8:00 pm having walked the equivalent to several miles, you begin to see why I had so little trouble sleeping.
I have also discovered that staying in hotels-even expensive ones-doesn’t always equate to a good night’s sleep. Hotel beds are normally too soft for my back. Our rental van in Europe had just a thin foam mattress but proved to be plenty comfortable for me since it was much firmer than an inner spring mattress. The Cabin-A LLC travel trailer that we use at home came with an inner spring mattress, which was advertised as an upgrade; however, we are thinking if switching to foam as it is just too soft for us. Obviously, the ideal situation would be to have a rig with a Tempur-Pedic memory foam mattress like the one we have in our bed at home but this is a costly option and may be heavier than traditional foam mattresses.
But my restful sleep while away on vacation may also have to do with the fact that I’m doing something I really love, discovering new places and people. I don’t think of my job as being a particularly high stress environment but I do find myself thinking about it late at night as I do about family problems or other issues related to the daily grind. Independent travel seems to distil life down to the bare essentials allowing me to live in the moment and forget about other concerns. Camping, in particular, has an specially soothing effect as there are always plenty of small tasks to do related to camp set-up, breakdown and maintenance. Even during “civilized” camping of the kind we did in Europe, things like having to go out to the bathhouse to take a shower occupy time that would otherwise be spent in front of the “boob tube” or worrying about things that we can’t do anything about.
As I start dreaming about new adventures and thinking of the logistics of where we plan to sleep, I need to keep reminding myself of those restful nights on the road and tell myself to stop thinking always of the worst case scenario. Perhaps the last two nights hunting around for a chirping plastic disk from hell will help remind me of that.
