Excited to sleep

Most of my life I've been a good sleeper. When things get crazy: deadlines, work or travel, I sometimes do more thinking than sleeping. We can all agree that sleep is so sweet if you've missed it or lacked it at some point. Mornings are never my friend.

My father joyed in waking up his grumpy little daughter with a loud voice, bright lights, and shouts of, "Morning, glory!" The funny thing is now that I'm grown up I realize he is not a morning person either. He grunts and muddles through just like I do, but somehow enjoyed tormenting his eldest offspring in this way.

As a child, I was not a napper. I slept well at night but I was rather hostile when made to nap. So dad got some back when I made lot of noise during nap time.

When I was in high school, my parents had a habit of going out to breakfast and I would be chastised if I was still in bed when they got back. This resorted in me jumping out of bed when I heard the garage door and throwing on sweats to pretend that I was really up and at 'em. It was an often feeble attempt to avoid the, "Are you going to stay in bed all day?" discussion. Sometime during college and the first major episode of sleep deprivation I learned the beauty of a good nap and the joy of sleeping in with no one judging.

With no little people to raise, I'm still a big fan of sleeping in on weekends whenever possible. The last few years with the challenges sleeping, I've become even more intense about opportunities to sleep a little extra. I've been accused of not being a grown up in this area but I don't care. The feeling is that strong in me.

The last year has been one of those seasons in my life when sleep has been challenged, but I've developed this odd tick for the first time. I don't know what else to call it.

When I lie down for a nap or for the night, first I relax, pop my neck, breathe deeply. Oh, the bed feels so good....then bam.  I'm so tired I start dreaming before my brain is unplugged.

I don't know how to explain it. I start seeing the dreams, but then my conscious mind says, "Yeah, you're dreaming! You are falling asleep!" And this animates me and I wake up again.

Oh the irony of my mind being so desperate for sleep that it is excited enough to wake me up to celebrate the almost-sleep. Does anyone else get that? I've never done that before the last year. It's definitely a strange new hiccup in my falling sleep pattern.  The more tired I am the more likely it will happen.

I guess I'll go try to drift off and not get so excited that I wake up. May you have sweet and quiet dreams!

Weirdest places ever slept....part 5 Chambres

When we are young, we are brave about cheap travel. Or we were anyway. Or we didn't know anything else. 

I'd never left the country when we committed to a two year over seas volunteer gig. As most volunteer things go, funds were tight but we weren't going to sit in apartment in Belgium without looking around.

We discovered that people in France advertise a sort of off the books place to stay by putting signs on the side of the road that said, "Chambre" -- room.

We set off on a weekend trip. The destination I believe was Mont St Michel. We'd heard of it's amazing beauty and set out in a rental car from Brussels. If you haven't put it on your list, it's definitely something to see. An island with a Monastery on top preserved in all its medieval-ness. The water gets very far out at low tide and people can be fooled that it is not coming back. When the tide comes in, it is at a crazy fast speed and people have been caught in a bad way. Seems like we heard tell of ghosts and such.

So we tootled down the French coast. We stopped  in Le Havre a site mentioned in the Henry V play of Shakespeare, after a real life battle event. We enjoyed the coastal towns where Brittany and Normandy change hands on the sea. We spent the afternoon in Deauville and chose a country road with the debate of where to say on everyone's lips. We saw one of these hand scrawled "chambre" signs in rough cardboard. We were far from anything at this point and turned down the small dirt track.

We arrived at a delightful real life farm. Something from a PBS television show with a big dirt patio in front of a wood shingled farm house. A lady took us upstairs showed us several rooms all very homey and country farm but somehow French. Not fancy at all but they had a certain rustic charm. They weren't prepared to do a meal for us but pointed us down the road to a little cafe-bar.

At that little bar, there was no English and they thought we were a great circus act sent to entertain them as I imagine we were. I had the most memorable steak of my life that night. We'd saved on the room and splurged on the food but even so we were in the country and it was comparatively cheap. (Always eat local when you can.)

So far nothing weird, right? You are correct. We went further down the coast to Mont St Michel and as is a common factor in our stories, we didn't know somewhere there was a holiday or event or something. So we could not stay on the Mont. Too bad because it was beautiful but also no vacancies. We set out across the country nearby with our new found confidence in chambres. We found a sign. This time it was just a modern walk up house. We'd already left our friends in the desperate search for rooms elsewhere, so of course we took what they offered. A paneled spare bedroom at the top of the not cherished house decorated a la 1975, crochet blanket included. The salle de bain was in a nook downstairs off the kitchen where the dining table sat.

While we made these arrangements in stumbling French with the lady proprietor and her cigarette, a couple of surly young men (teens?) were playing a video game or watching television in the dark salon behind her. No big deal we all have our own rooms right. We later realized how far this room arrangement was to the toilet and that for our convenience they had put a chemical camp toilet in the corner of our paneled bedroom. Not curtained off, just sitting there.

When we'd come in quite late from the explorations of the dimly lit stone ambiance of Mont St Michel, those men, guys, dudes, were still in the livingroom and didn't acknowledge us coming in. Weird.

A few hours later I awoke, with a need to go to the loo. I'd not been counting on strange housing arrangements and hadn't brought a robe. The urge was great, the need to get back to sleep intense. The odd dudes lurking in the salon flashed in my mind's eye. I gave in to the chemical toilet.

The odd plastic echo sound however woke my significant other who couldn't figure out what the sound was. So he turned on a flashlight and shown it around the room much to the audible horror of both of us. I can still hear my best friend laughing as I tell this story.

Coming down to do ablutions in the morning a table full of even more surly young men perched in the kitchen eating cereal -- silently. Quite a contrast to the sunny farm kitchen and bowls of chocolate and croissants that we'd had at the last chambre. It was my significant other's turn to make people wonder what the sounds near by might be as he'd waited to use the real toilet.

Okay one more chambre on another trip: Not sure where we'd been but it was just the two of us and we were on our way back to Brussels but still in France. We followed a chambre sign on small road. It was a farm perhaps not charming but a reasonable looking place. We talked to the man the price was good. I don't remember if we'd agreed already to stay or if we were taking a look. The man in the wellington plastic boots marched us away from the farm and down a field path. Our own bungalow perhaps?

As we walked I explained to him in my budding French, we are Americans from Kansas City. He said to me, "Well I don't speak American." Yes, he used the French word for American, not English. He was weathered and hard beaten and a smoker with a rough voice. He'd understood me though so big bonus. Pat on the back dor my French. So I said, we live in Belgium. Farmer said, "And I don't speak Belge." Negating the French speaking population with a swat of his hand. Alright-y then.

The "bungalow" turned out to by one of those tiny trailers (caravans) the size of car, anchored in a field. It was not redecorated other than it had clean linens. It smelled as if it had been moldering in the field a good many years for unsuspecting tired tourists to come along.

Another theme in our stories - well, we were tired (or it was late) and we didn't know where else to go...so we slept in the yellow stinky trailer aka "chambre."

Weirdest places ever slept, part 4, God's house

As part of our day job related fund raising, we travel to all kinds of places and hotels. Sometimes when it is in our nonprofit world, we stay with friends or the locals offer to put us up. This is great as it saves money as we raise it. Several churches have had space to host us and we've always been grateful, but it's also some of the strangest sleeping quarters I've experienced.

I don't know if any of you have ever been in a huge building alone as a kid or an adult. As a kid I remember we'd play hide and seek in the basement of the church I grew up in while the adults ate finger food and drank punch upstairs somewhere. It always seemed like you'd get spooked and run like you'd never run in your life down a dark hallway. Also my dad used to rent "computer time"  in a big office building in downtown KC. I'd be the only person on the 10th floor poking in people's desks and such. Then I'd go even further down to the bathroom and get spooked and run like mad back to the computer room that was completely sealed and sound proof. My dad wouldn't have heard me yelling or running or anything the way it was set up. It was great fun.  I give you this as way as background to the places with dark hallways that might effect odd places I slept as an adult.

The first time we slept in a guest room inside a church it was in a smaller community, but the church could probably seat a couple hundred people. We had a compulsion to walk around and see everything just so we knew where we were at and how the land lay. My significant other sneaked into the sanctuary and tapped on the cymbals while I was in another part of the church getting a drink or something and tried to say it wasn't him. The church folks had thoughtfully put a lock on the door of the room.

One nice thing about a lock is that you are in a huge building alone and it's nice not to feel vulnerable. Two is that folks arrive at all kinds of early hours for church services and you'd like to not introduce yourself in your skivvies.

So another time, another religious institution, the guest room was actually a large lounge with six sofas that made into beds. So you just picked one and opened up. While it was a big space (besides being in a big building) it very distinctly wasn't a single bedroom. We dressed in the attached bathroom.

Well, putting it mildly I'm not an early riser. The early risers in this rural farm community were getting coffee going behind a folding curtain that attached to our room. My significant other got in the shower and gave me a moment to awake. I started worrying this big room was a Sunday School area and I should get moving. I traded the sofa room for the bathroom only to hear pounding on the door of our area. I was about to turn on the shower when my man opened the door and said that I needed to hurry they were going to have to turn off the water.  The snow storm had frozen and broken pipes which were filling the heating system with water. Uhm, okay, no pressure.

When I came out to join in the donuts and early morning church rituals, you could hear the water pounding in the heating vents like tribal drums. Really weird sound.

Okay, so another room another state. This time attached to the men's bathroom as this was the only bathroom that had a shower. My spouse taught me that it is inappropriate to balance one's makeup bag on the handle of a urinal, but honestly you just work with whatever space you have and there wasn't any. We stayed in this arrangement for eight weeks. It was in a urban spill from a very large city. The kitchen was in the basement which meant walking through the sanctuary (in the dark) and down some stairs and hallways to the kitchen for hot water or microwaves etc. So I had to psych myself up for the journey (see the paragraph of childhood basement running above!).

It was fine and we didn't mind. These are just the little challenges you don't think of unless you stay a place as unusual as the back of thousands of square feet of public use space. After a few days, someone from the pastoral family mentioned that we needed to double check the side door by the sanctuary (not the one we used in the back dark parking lot!) because it didn't always latch and sometimes homeless people came inside to get warm. No big deal but it was best to check. Yeah. Note to self check the doors and the dark hallways on the way to the far away kitchen.

So then my significant one had to leave for another meeting and I got to stay there completely alone for two weeks. It was fine. Really. So maybe yes, I ran a couple times thru dark hallways, but I was grateful for somewhere to stay. It probably helped the intensity of my prayers!

Weirdest Places Slept, part 3, Place of the Dead

We spent a big chunk of life only going to visit people we knew when we went on vacation, grandparents, college roommates, that sort of cheap and comfortable vacation where you see your people.

When we started traveling for work reasons, we went a lot of places that hadn't been on the agenda financially or as major destinations. We had some meetings in New Jersey, New York,  and other east coast locals so we drove from the midwest. We didn't used to plan for hotels and on these trips a lot of people host us so we were just winging it.

In the middle of New York somewhere far from civilization, we found ourselves too far to go back and too far to go on as the wee hours began to make us sleepy. We finally took the next exit because we saw a sign for the "White Horse Inn." Taking a dark exit far from everything we'd seen for some time, we drove another 10 miles or so into the woods and discovered the White Horse Inn was a pancake - dinner place and they were locking up. We really needed to stop for the night so we asked if there was anything near by, a bed and breakfast perhaps?

An older fellow pointed us to a campground just a few miles down the road (still further into the deep dark woods and away from the highway) and they had a hotel on the grounds. Perfect.

It was dark and late, we could have missed it but somehow saw the turn. No lights or anything, it was one of those old methodist camp ground type things with the little victorian cottages surrounding a main green. (This sort of thing though this is not the one.)

We parked in front of  a white clapboard two story hotel, relieved and tired and wondering where we were. We'd passed no towns of any sort.

My significant other checked us in while I stood by the luggage at the bottom of the stairs looking at a painting. Not an experienced artist, but well meaning. I looked at the caption and it said, 'painted by Mary SoandSo in a trance.' Trance? I looked around further and there was a quilt done in a trance.

When my honey came up with the keys, we sort of put some things together he saw at the front desk and what I was seeing and realized we'd just checked into a camp for people who like to talk to dead people. Mediums, spiritualists, and such. Uh oh.

It was so late, we were tired and now paid up so we just went to our room, even though this would not have been a place we would pick out of website to stay. Let's just say it's not our spiritual cup of tea.

It was a lovely old room with wood floors and metal bed. You know how those old eastern board places don't have a/c? Well, this was one of them. We had the lights off in a few minutes since we were beat. My man was gleefully speculating if the curtains were blowing in the summer breeze or ...? I fell asleep. He told some family members who were completely terrified for us that we'd stayed there.

It was a lovely old camp ground but as we drove away each little cottage had a sign for a psychic or a medium or something. It struck me as a vaguely sinister environment with a quaint veneer over the top. A little arsenic and old lace.

Taking a different tact on the same trip later, we stayed in a hotel near the highway that had a hot tub the size of a car in one half of the BEDROOM space. Ick. And when I turned on the TV to porn,  we were really skeeved out. I think I slept on top of my scarf. Let's say, this may when we began to realize we needed to plan a little more carefully.